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This insane smartphone app lets you copy and paste elements of the real world into Photoshop

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This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen, and I had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1st, but French artist, designer and programmer, Cyril Diagne has figured out how to use augmented reality to literally copy and paste the world around you straight into a Photoshop document. Yeah, for real. And he’s even released the source code on GitHub!

Diagne announced his creation to the world via Twitter this week, and it really looks like some kind of After Effects fakery. If he hadn’t released the source code, then you probably wouldn’t even believe it was real at all. But it shows him clearly snapping objects around him, which are then cut out from their backgrounds and then pasted right into the current Photoshop document.

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Calling all wildlife photographers (and their kids) – Here’s how you can see wild animals in your home

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This is an awfully frustrating time for wildlife photographers right now. And anybody who has kids. You’re stuck at home, can’t go anywhere, can’t do anything, can’t see anything interesting. Well, Google has the answer – augmented reality.

Google’s mobile search has a feature which allows you to search for an animal which can then be placed into your environment using your smartphone’s camera and augmented reality. It even appears to pick up on the ambient lighting and be able to apply it in realtime, too.

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Augmented Reality Photo Studio app lets you photograph virtual models in real locations

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We’ve met a camera that lets you take photos in virtual reality, but there’s now an app that took things a step further. Augmented Reality Photo Studio lets you go to real-life locations and shoot virtual portraits. It’s certainly an interesting concept and it can be great for location scouting and trying out lighting setups.

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This 3D portal smartphone optical illusion requires no special glasses to see

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This is a very cool piece of tech. Swedish developer Peder Norrby has done something pretty amazing with the iPhone X. He’s created a 3D optical illusion completely “in-camera”… well, in-phone, really, although it does use the phone’s front camera to achieve the effect. It’s very cool and doesn’t require any special viewing glasses. It holds all kinds of potential for the future as 3D cameras and 3D scanning start to become more advanced.

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This augmented reality app lets you plan your shot in real time from your phone

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Augmented reality has mostly been a bit of a gimmick so far. To put dinosaurs on your desk, or help guide you around a city. It’s very cool, but still mostly just a gimmick. Now that the hype of augmented reality has started to die down a little, though, things are looking up. It has made some pretty great strides over the last couple of years. Particularly in fields such as healthcare.

Now, though, filmmakers are starting to see some benefit from augmented reality, too. A new app, Blocker allows you to block out your scenes based on what the camera sees, enhanced by 3D models. The app, in real time, tracks the models to the scene, allowing you to work out your angles and shots, while at a location, in advance of the shoot.

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It’s not really a camera, yet this Canon invention will record video from any vantage point in a sports field

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With sports in-stadium income on the decline, stadiums are trying to figure out new revenue streams. But this is a photography blog, so there is a photography angle (no pun intended) involved.

Canon is developing a new “camera system” that will enable viewers to “fly” in the stadium and view the game via any vantage point that they choose.

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Google Lens will turn your smartphone’s camera into a powerful AI & AR search tool

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Google seems to heavily turning into an AI company above all else right now. AI is a necessary part of Google’s search in order to provide the most suitable results. But it’s gone far beyond that now. At Google’s I/O developer conference, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google Lens.

It’s a new technology designed to leverage Google’s computer vision and AI technology. The goal is to make your phone’s camera “smarter”. Now your camera won’t only see what you’ll see, but it’ll understand what it is, in real time. This data can then be used in a multitude of ways, including search.

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Want to get into VR but don’t know what rig to buy? Watch this video

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Virtual and augmented reality has become a big deal in the last couple of years. There’s a lot of different options out there now for shooting and streaming 360° content. If you want to get into VR content, though, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Most of the currently available solutions are quite expensive. The ones that aren’t may be inadequate for your needs.

This video from Pixvana walks us through the basic options. It helps us make decisions based on our own requirements. If you just want to stream to Facebook, for example, you don’t need a rig costing tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, if you want to make super detailed high resolution immersive content, you’re probably not going to manage it with a Theta.

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Tiny vibrations bring still photos to life in dynamic interactive images

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A photograph is, by its very nature, a still image. Good ones perform their task very well. As technology has evolved the lines between photo and video have started to become a little blurred. We’ve got live photos, Instagram supports video, and now wants to be SnapChat.

Then we have augmented reality. The combination of computer generated data and real world imagery in real time.

The big problem with augmented reality is that the two don’t really mix together too fluidly yet. MIT PhD student Abe Davis has figured out a possible way to solve this problem. It’s a process he calls Interactive Dynamic Video. It uses tiny vibrations picked up in video to simulate real world movement in still images.

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Snapchat’s “lenses” contain a whole lot of cool technology

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Snapchat might be quite a silly and frivolous app to some people, while others live on it.  Regardless of your thoughts on its practical application, it employs some pretty serious technology in order to be able to do what it does with its “lenses”, or filters as most people call them.

From the same facial recognition principles found in your DSLR to advanced feature & motion tracking in 3D space, a lot of the technology, while advanced, isn’t really all that new.  What is new is the ability for all these tasks to be performed together simultaneously in real time.

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