Wondering what is the differences among the digital image formats? Some of the more common ones are GIF (CompuServe Graphics Interchange Format) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group JFIF Format) .Wherever available choose the “RAW” option when taking photographs with a digital camera because RAW is a virtually lossless, unprocessed capture of data from the camera’s sensor.Saving in minimally compressed RAW means that you will always be able to come back to the data file and manipulate it however you want. By saving in the commonly seen alternative JPEG camera format, you are introducing unremovable, hard-baked processing like white balance and contrast into the image. Saving in RAW is a bit like saving a negative.The advantage of RAW is also its disadvantage in that you do have to post-process it with software like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom post shot. Another disadvantage is its large file size. There are considerations in this medium that are different from those for print.

The No. 1 issue when dealing with online images is quality versus file size – a larger image file size usually produces a good quality image, but it slows download and consequently degrades user experience.From a monetizing sense, slow downloads mean users are more likely to get distracted and leave a Web page prematurely. Less important for smaller-site purposes, although still an issue, is that the larger the file size the more storage and bandwidth you need.What’s desired is high quality in a small file size.The more pixels or other data, and the more color in an image, the bigger the file. However, the files size can be reduced through compression. The Web browser on a computer screen lends itself to compression that would be unacceptable in large print like a billboard — garbage called “artifacts” and other degradation appear.Browsers also have limitations that restrict the types of files they can show, which eliminates most of the 70 or so commonly available file types.

Once you’ve captured your RAW image, or acquired through other means other formatted images, like printing industry-standard TIFF from a stock agency, you can concentrate on converting it to the three image file types seen natively in a browser that is without plugins like Flash.The native image file types are JPG (also known as “JPEG”), GIF and PNG. JPEG compression is “lossy,” which means the compression algorithm dumps file data that’s not necessary for a computer screen browser. Thus, getting rid of redundancy, JPEG provides for small file sizes. However, JPEG allows for 8 bits per color which is good.Drawbacks are few. The principal one is that you can’t keep editing and saving JPEGs because quality degrades.Choose GIF for Graphics as this format provides a size-beneficial “lossy” compression, but with less color support.GIF is limited to 256 colors. GIF works well when significant parts of the image have one color. GIF is poor at handling details.

Choose PNG for screen shots as PNG is the open source successor to Compuserve’s GIF, but unlike GIF, it supports 16-million colors, called “True Color”.Like GIF, it’s good for expansive areas of the same color. It’s commonly used for screen shots when displaying them within a browser environment.

You might think app design is the same, whether the software is being developed for iOS or Android. But creating highly polished, elegant-looking apps is simply easier to do when developing for iOS. That’s the prevailing conventional wisdom among developers who code for both platforms.Design is built into Apple’s DNA. Google’s legacy, on the other hand, is search. So it’s not too difficult to guess which platform places a higher premium on app U.I. and aesthetics — and which platform makes it easier to create beautiful software.

When coding for iOS, developers deal with a very limited number of screen resolutions and hardware profiles. But when coding for Android, developers have to resolve a virtually limitless set of device parameters.Android devices come in different shapes and sizes, different screen resolutions, different device speeds — and that’s actually a huge hurdle. You need to be testing out 20 different phones with different resolutions and different processors, and that definitely makes development slower.An accent like a simple one-pixel stroke may look terrific on Android devices with a high resolution, “then we pull out a handful of older devices and it just looks bad.” In these situations, the developer has to rethink the design element and account for different cases in the app’s code.

Also For images,Android assets are generated at three resolutions: 1x for older devices, 2x for high-resolution devices, and an awkward 1.5x resolution for other devices. But some developers may skip this high level of support for outlier devices, leading to blurry, jaggy visuals for an unlucky few.Indeed, mobile development must move at lightning speed by necessity, and app teams are often small and strapped for cash. If excessive time is spent perfecting a simple design element, it means less time will be devoted to innovating in other ways. As a result, Android app developers often settle on a less detailed aesthetic.

Developer tools and documentation are also less robust in the Android space. While Apple has had 20 years to perfect the art of developer support,refining its approach to SDKs and building well-defined human interface guidelines. While Google is essentially starting from scratch with Android.The upshot is that iOS developers simply have more tools to implement intriguing, unique design. It feels like you’ve got more documentation, both officially sanctioned and third-party, so that makes things smoother,which isn’t the case with Android.One of the hangups [with Android] is so much of the stuff doesn’t feel fully documented.And some detailed design features are easier to implement in iOS because of the wide variety of APIs and libraries available. “It’s harder on Android to do nice design touches such as transitions or rounded corners,” Steven Yarger, mobile product manager at Trulia said.iOS definitely makes transitions a lot easier. Whether it’s U.I,elements fading in and out, or sliding, those things can be used and you have a good sense that it’ll consistently look good across iOS devices. On Android, there are different frameworks, but the problem is you dont know what’s consistently going to work across devices.

Despite all these Android hurdles, Google seems to be turning the tide in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Google now offers an Android developer Google+ page and Android training classes. And now there’s a solid set of design guidelines, which makes it easier to implement platform-consistent design. That said, the fragmentation issue continues to rear its ugly head: Less than 3 percent of Android devices currently run Ice Cream Sandwich.But not everything’s rosy in the iOS camp, either. Although iOS makes it easier to implement highly detailed app design, Android offers more freedom with what you can do.On Android, you can do whatever you want. With Apple, you’re more constrained. But the tradeoff is because you’re constrained, you’re given tools that make the apps look nicer.

The very nature of mobile-sharing apps has changed the types of imagery that people upload. There is also an added on-the-move life-streaming nature to the whole thing. Photos found on the flowing Instagram news feed don’t look like the ones on Flickr.Instagram is a community conducive to likes and comments, whereas Flickr focuses more on displaying collections of photographs in photostreams, sets and galleries, organized by tags and maps. Yet interestingly, the most-used camera on Flickr is the iPhone4.Flickr operates more as a storage space and ongoing project.

Photographer Chris Azar says that he sees Flickr as “a good space for my DSLR photos, and Instagram for grab shots and realtime stuff.I send Insta stuff to Flickr, too,” he adds. “Instagram is almost exclusively mobile versus Flickr, which is exclusively desktop. Instagram features the Andy Warhol-esque polaroids of our day. One perfect description of Instagram lives on Instagrammers.com. “Instagram unearths your creative side and gets it flowing. It allows you to make artistic pictures even if you always thought you were the least creative person on earth, and last but not least, it makes you part of an international and multicultural community that is really into sharing.” And on Instagram, everything is public. Audiences appear and disappear almost as quickly as images on the stream.

That is not the case on Flickr, where users have granular settings for changing photos to public, visible to friends, visible to family or completely private. Communities are more deliberate. Following is not an option, but joining is.Flickr provides a list of the most popular tags on the site. Not surprisingly, a few of the biggest categories include canon, instagramapp, iphoneography, nikon and wedding. The iPhone4 is the most popular camera of the Flickr community, just ahead of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and the Canon EOS REBEL T2i.The very fact that community members of Flickr have the option to upload from a point-and-shoot camera, however, changes the popular imagery that one is likely to see on Flickr.The iPhone4 may be the most popular camera of Flickr users, but the four other cameras are not smartphones.What Instagram lacks, Flickr fulfills: A possibility for adjusting privacy settings so that every photo uploaded doesn’t appear out there, for the entire Web to see. On Flickr, there is no such thing as social media celebrity.The public nature of Instagram makes the idea of celebrity not only normal, but encouraged.

A hacker with the handle “Hardcore Charlie” has stolen source code for VMware’s ESX hypervisor and posted it on the Internet.A hypervisor provides a virtualization layer between operating systems and the underlying hardware, creating a virtual machine. This lets users run multiple virtual machines on one processor. Hypervisors are key to virtualization and cloud computing.Hardcore Charlie claims he obtained the code for the VMware Kernel and the TraceViz GUI. He’s promised to post more VMware source code on the Interne.VMware stated that a single file from the ESX source code had been posted and that it dates back to about 2003 to 2004. It said customers may not face an increased security threat. The company is investigating the theft. The VMware documents appear to have been obtained by Hardcore Charlie during an attack on Beijing-based China National Electronics Import-Export last month.About 1 terabyte of data was pilfered in that raid, Hardcore Charlie told Kaspersky Labs. He apparently has about 300 MB of VMWare source code.CEIEC has denied that it had been hacked by Hardcore Charlie. This led the hacktivist to release more documents, including U.S. military data.

TraceViz lets developers annotate source code with trace points that carry an ID, a class and some data, and then view the sequence of events later in a Java GUI.TraceViz appears to be a combination of the Traceroute computer network diagnostic tool and a GUI.Traceroute is available on most operating systems. In Windows, it’s named “tracert”; the PathPing tool in Windows NT has similar functionality. Linux installations offer a variant of the tool known as “tracepath.” In IPv6, the tool is known as “traceroute6.It’s easy to get live data over the network by using TraceViz on a computer connected to a remote host.

More than 50 percent of enterprise data centers are virtualized, and that makes virtual infrastructure a prime target for attack, said Eric, Chiu, president and founder of HyTrust.So, “the theft of VMware ESX source code … is no surprise,” Chiu told TechNewsWorld. “Without securing the virtual infrastructure, enterprises are leaving a huge area of their datacenter open to attack.” VMWare offers customers security in various ways. It launched vShield, which offers protection from network-based threats in virtual data centers, at VMWorld 2010.Earlier this month, antivirus vendor McAfee launched its Management for Optimized Virtual Environments. This integrates with VMWare vShield Endpoint, which protects VMs.

The stolen ESX code may not pose much of a threat to users of VMWare’s products. Back in 2007, VMWare unveiled ESX Server 3i, the successor to ESX. The ESX Server 3i product evolved into ESXi, and VMWare has been urging customers to migrate to it from ESX for greater security and improved manageability.Further, “a potential exposure isn’t an exploit,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, pointed out. “We have thousands of potential exposures identified every month across all platforms, and the industry has learned to deal with these issues reasonably well over the last decade.” Although any threat will likely be most pronounced in cloud deployments,these solutions tend to be a bit more resilient than most. Right now, this is more of a nuisance than anything else, someone looking for their 15 minutes of fame.

One of the worst-kept secrets in the technology space- Google Drive, is finally here — live and yours to explore.But if you’re already using a cloud service, or maybe even a couple of services the question undoubtedly arises, Do you really need another cloud platform? This question gets more complicated when you consider that Google already has a number of cloud services such as Play for music storage, Picasa for photos, YouTube for videos and even Gmail as well. Google Drive doesn’t seek to replace any of these existing Google services — though it does replace one cloud service. Instead, Google Drive seeks to replace the USB thumb drive stuffed into your backpack or purse. And, if you pay up for extra storage, maybe even the portable disk drive too. You can store all manner of file formats, and Drive gives you the option to convert files into Google-friendly formats as well.

After using Google Drive on an Apple iMac, a Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, and an Asus Transformer Pad tablet, it’s clear that those who will prefer Google Drive are those who already prefer Google itself.Indeed, if you’ve ever used Google Docs, you’ll feel immediately comfortable using Google Drive. And if you’re a Google Docs power user, you’ll probably outright love Google Drive.The service offers an iCloud-matching 5GB of storage for free, which should be enough for most users. If you want more space, it will cost you — 25GB of storage for $2.50 monthly, 100GB is $5 monthly and 1TB will cost $50 a month. Google will allow users to purchase as much as 16TB of storage, but the price has not been disclosed beyond 1TB. Upgrading to any increased storage size will boost your Gmail storage up to 25GB.In the browser, Google Drive works exactly the same as Google Docs. In fact, Drive is replacing Docs and soon all Docs users will be Drive users, on mobile devices and on the web. No need to worry about lost files: All your documents will show up in your Google Drive once you’ve switched over, and the process is painless.

Even real-time editing of shared docs with multiple people works in Google Drive just as it did in Google Docs. Sharing and emailing also works exactly the same as before and, just as Docs did, Drive maintains a revision history of edited files, allowing users to view previous versions as far back as 30 days.Like Google Docs, there are no ads in Google Drive. There is, however, a lot of whitespace that could make for ad real estate if ever Google wanted to go that route.But the new service isn’t perfect. In the web browser version of Google Drive, the audio files don’t play back automatically, instead forcing you to download the file to your desktop, and open it up in another app before you can give it a listen.

The mobile app is currently available only for Android, but is promised for iOS — audio files are kicked out to music apps such as Google’s own Play Music or Spotify. Videos play back just fine in the browser, but in the mobile app, you’re once again kicked into another app to view your media. Rivals such as Dropbox, SugarSync and iCloud stream media without requiring a download or opening another app. It would be nice to see Google do the same.On the Galaxy Nexus, the Google Drive app worked as well as any other app (e.g., People, Calendar, Maps) built into Ice Cream Sandwich. With a clean, ICS-consistent aesthetic, it’s one of the better looking and easier to use cloud storage apps available for Android today.Like Dropbox, Box, SugarSync and many other competing services, a desktop app for Windows and Mac OS X is available for Google Drive as well. But It has little advantage to using the desktop app over the web-based version of Drive. In both versions, uploading a file is as simple as clicking and dragging a file from your desktop into a folder or webpage. And in both versions of Drive, stored documents open in a browser window, and not into other apps.

So far, the best feature of Google Drive is its integration with other Google products, and Google says further integration with Google+, Gmail and Chrome is on the way. So, if you’re already using an Android phone, and Gmail is your main inbox and Calendar is where you make your plans, then Drive will fit into your life nicely.But there is a flipside: If you’re not steeped in the Google ecosystem, or you’re perfectly happy using one of the many competing cloud services, I don’t see much reason to get behind the wheel of Google Drive just yet. Unless, of course, you refuse to pay for cloud storage, and you want to distribute your overflowing files across as many free services as possible.

Bowel Mover Pro ($0.99 iPhone/iPad)

Aficionados of the long-running sitcom Scrubs will know this one essential fact: Everything comes down to poo. Really. Tracking your bowel movements is apparently a great way to monitor your health on a day-to-day basis. This app will help you track what you ate and how it turned into a bowel movement, with your stress level and the amount of fiber, and water, in your diet – really, every ingredient that makes for poo. Email your charts to your doctor or… yeah, let’s just keep it with your doctor. Bonus feature: Tweet your poo to your friends.

TapThat ($1.69 Android)

This falls into the “you’ve got to be kidding me” realm. This app has the ability to get your phone to fornicate with another NFC-enabled Android device running Gingerbread or Ice Cream Sandwich. There is really not much we can do to explain that, so watch the publisher’s slightly NSFW video below. Thanks to Twitter follower Michael Nicholas for sending this one in.

Bush Shoot-Out (Free Android)

As the Google Play description so helpfully points out, this is a shooting game. But it is not your normal Doom-style first-person shooter. This is more like a bad 1990s quarter-arcade shooter. You are President George H. W. Bush and the White House has been infiltrated by bad guys. An assault rifle pops out of the desk in the Oval Office and you start shooting down bad guys like you were a Duck Hunt pro. It is hard to tell if this game is mocking Bush or turning him into a hero. Either way, for a shooting game, it is not that bad.

Demotivational Pics+ (Free iPhone/iPad)

The crazy-picture-with-bad-caption meme is way out of control. It has been for years, really. And here we are, in app form. Demotivational Pics+ takes this to an extreme by providing daily pictures accompanied by bad captions, with the idea of making you feel pretty much terrible about everything. That is, if you are not – how does it go? – rolling on the floor laughing?

Nose Candy ($1.99 Android)

Also apparently known as the Charlie Sheen App. There are certain things that fly on Android that Apple and its App Store guidelines would never, ever approve. This would probably be Example A. The concept is simple. Cut up a bunch of fake cocaine and pretend to sniff it. There are five levels of difficulty and the phone vibrates when you reach the appropriate level of intoxication.

Geico BroStache (Free iPhone)

No list of weird things would be complete without an entry from Geico. The App Store description says, “Just like the GEICO commercial, now you too can do dumb things with your smartphone!” Boy, can you ever. There are seven BroStaches to choose from. Put the smartphone to your lips and it will follow your words along with your ridiculous BroStache.

Game for Cats (Free iPad)

This app proudly proclaims itself to be, “the first interspecies game on the App Store.” Sure, we can get behind that. The game starts with two levels: a laser pointer that your cat can chase around the screen, and a mouse. You will need to pay $1.99 to fully unlock the mouse level (the upgrade comes with a free butterfly level.) You can also purchase and upgrade to move the laser pointer on the iPad with your iPhone (otherwise it moves automatically). Once your cat catches the laser pointer dot, mouse or butterfly, it accumulates points which you can share with a leader board or on Facebook and Twitter. Brilliant.

We’re all familiar with Apple’s love affair for thin devices. Although the third-generation iPad surprised many by gaining about half a millimeter of thickness, it looks like Apple could be back to trimming product dimensions by using a new kind of display technology in the next iPhone.Instead of using a display comprising a number of separate layers, Apple could use in-cell touch display technology. The report says Apple would be sourcing its in-cell displays from Toshiba and Sharp.

“The advantage of in-cell is that you’re streamlining the manufacturing process, so it will help in driving efficiencies and reduce cost. Additionally, by reducing the number of layers, you reduce the size and thickness of the device, making it thinner and lighter.If the iPhone has a larger 4- to 4.3-inch display, as some reports expect it to, that extra glass could add a bit of heft to the iPhone’s weight. Thus, Apple would need to find new ways to keep the phone from gaining too much weight.In-cell display tech eliminates that middle layer of glass, combining the LCD and touch sections of the display into a single layer. One way this can be successfully accomplished is by “multiplexing” the electrodes normally used to relay touch input — that is, using the same electrodes to handle the signals for both touch control and the pixels of the LCD, according to a 2010 IHS report on touch-screen displays.

In-cell technology isn’t currently deployed in any shipping cellphones. And it shouldn’t be confused with the similar-sounding “Super” technologies from Samsung. Super AMOLED and Super LCD screens use on-cell technology rather than in-cell.Right now, in-cell touch displays are still an emerging technology. So while the core technology promises long-term benefits, yield rates could be a problem in the shorter terms.But that’s the deal with any new technological process, isn’t it? In the months before the new iPad was announced, yield rates for Apple’s Retina display were a huge question mark.

So is in-cell really something Apple would pull the trigger on? It is believed that the next iPhone display will implement in-cell touch. But of course, we’ll have to wait and see how it pans out when the next iPhone actually debuts.

20th April 1964: Bell’s Picturephone service dials up the world’s first videophone call, and the New York World Fair’s science consultant William L. Laurence gets some face time with Anaheim Bulletin managing editor Donald Shaffer at Disneyland.

The video chat was part of a large public demonstration at the World’s Fair that included seven calling stations. New Yorkers could speak with Disneyland visitors at a similar set-up in the California theme park. “Long lines formed at either end as consumers clamored to see the telephone of the future,” wrote Steve Schnaars and Cliff Wymbs in a paper about the history of videophones.But the clamoring stopped soon thereafter, even though most users had good things to say about the Picturephone, which had a video camera, screen, a push-button phone, speakers and a power supply. The Picturephone even let users control whether the video feed was transmitted to the person they were calling. The sound and quality were good, and people generally liked seeing the person they were speaking to.

But even company employees were not totally convinced. ”We can’t hope to provide Picturephone service for the ordinary residence and business office in the near future but we are hopeful of offering the service in the next few months on a market trial basis,” an Bell engineer told the Star News in 1964. Commercial service started on June 25, 1964 at calling booths in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Interest was lukewarm, at best. For starters, customers needed to schedule their allotted 15 minutes of screen time in advance, which made video chatting nearly as tedious a doctor’s appointment. Only three cities had access to the futuristic telephone, so its reach was pretty limited. Plus, it was also incredibly expensive. A 3-minute video call from New York to Washington, D.C. cost $16, or the equivalent of about $120 today.

The following year, AT&T slashed prices almost 50 percent to encourage customers to make videophone calls. When that strategy failed, the company relocated the video booths to Bell-owned buildings. That didn’t help either.Finally in 1968, the company pulled up the white flag and admitted customers weren’t interested.

According to Korea IT News Apple will use Liquidmetal for the casing of the iPhone 5, which will be launched in June.Liquidmetal is the commercial name of an amorphous metal alloy developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology and marketed by a company they set up called Liquidmetal Technologies.The alloy’s been used in more than 10 million hinges for mobile phones and smartphones, more than 2 million antennae, over 2 million cases and more than 1 million pounds of coatings materials. Apple purchased a worldwide exclusive license to commercialize Liquidmetal Technologies’ in the field of consumer electronics, according to the latter’s 10-K report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.With the license, Apple is likely to use the technology in future mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad or even the MacBook Air. Liquidmetal offers a lightweight solution that has all the characteristics of metal and can be an attractive alternative to plastics.

Liquidmetal alloys contain atoms of different sizes that form a dense mix with very little free volume. Unlike crystalline metals, they don’t have an obvious melting point. At high temperatures, Liquidmetal behaves like plastic. Because of their non-crystalline, or amorphous, structures, Liquidmetals are harder than titanium or aluminum alloys used in similar applications.Liquidmetal alloys can be heat-formed the same way plastics can, up to a point. Another term for heat-forming Liquidmetal is metal injection molding. Metal injection molding “lets you fabricate complex geometries similar to injection molded plastics” but with the advantages of a metal alloy like strength, rigidity, wear and corrosion resistance.From a design standpoint,rigidity and durability may be best benefits.

Metal injection molding is “still a fairly immature technology, so using it can be quite costly,” iSuppli’s Keller pointed out. Apple is already using this technology right now, as are other manufacturers, but its use is limited to small mechanical internal components such as the SIM card ejector on the previous iPhone as well as other internal components.Further, there are “some limitations” to the process in terms of the physical size of products that can be made with metal injection molding because of its relative newnes. When you are injecting molten material into a die, that material has to be very tightly temperature-controlled and has to be cooled at a certain rate, and it’s a matter of working out the techniques.It has been used on the casing of SanDisk’s Cruzer Titanium USB flash drives and Sansa flash-based MP3 players. It has also been used in the casings of some mobile phones such as those made by Nokia  subsidiary Vertu.

Apple paid Liquidmetal Technologies US$20 million for the licensing rights to the latter’s IP for use in the consumer electronics sector.Cupertino’s likely to work on getting around the size limitations imposed by the metal injection molding process. Now Apple’s exploring the use of this manufacturing technique into more and more components of their products, and possibly even planning to use this technology for larger, more visible components such as the enclosure. Apple is right now developing techniques to expand this manufacturing process into larger and larger parts like enclosures.

Apple posted a job listing for a “Computer Vision specialist,” the tech-obsessed chamber began speculating which Apple product line would be employing this person’s expertise also the job posting made frequent reference to 3-D: “3-D geometry,” “3-D reconstruction” and “cameras and surfaces in a 3-D environment.”  Apple could be delving into applications as familiar as simple 3-D video capture, to as arcane as real-time environment capture for an augmented-reality system.Computer vision is about enabling the computer or mobile device to make sense of a 3-D image the way humans do. “For this job application, Apple appears to be looking for someone who could help them think about how stereo cameras could look at a scene, and figure out how to do something useful for its owner.

Currently, 3-D in the mobile space is defined by crappy stereoscopic cameras, and glasses-free 3-D displays with incredibly subtle — and sometimes imperceptible — 3-D spatial effects. Android smartphone manufacturers have shown off 3-D image- and video-capture in the LG Optimus 3-D Max and HTC EVO 3-D, but consumers haven’t warmed up to these simple implementations.3-D displays on smartphones today are nothing more than a gimmick. The lack of good content is a major challenge. There may be opportunities with 3-D gaming on tablets and smartphones in the future, but it is still a very niche segment.But looking toward the future, Apple could have the chops to turn consumer interest around. Apple has been dabbling in the 3-D arts for quite some time, if patent filings are any indicator. One particularly interesting implementation is a 3-D display calibrated by eye positioning. It would provide subtle 3-D effects, like drop shadows that dynamically change depending on your position. Apple also won a patent for its own glasses-free 3-D display.

I would expect that Apple is focusing entirely on 3-D environment capture — the idea that your iPhone could create a 3-D map out of the world around you with a simple swipe of the camera around your environment.It would create a meta view of the world. This would be useful for helping us quickly and intuitively understand information in a number of scenarios. For example, imagine you need to replace the wiper fluid in your car, and you’ve never done it before. You could use your smartphone camera to identify your car, and then receive a quick 3-D visual explanation of what to do — all with better spatial representation than 2D would provide.

Maybe they want to render videos faster on things like video conference calls, or do refreshes without refreshing the whole screen. Apple may also want to tweak the rendering of an image, making it more understandable to the human eye, rather than just displaying it accurately.Dr. Keith Price of the University of Southern California’s Computer Vision Laboratory thinks Apple could embark on something like Photosynth, a large-scale augmented reality product. Apple could also avoid the need for dual cameras by using a single camera and combining multiple images for a 3-D version.