CAVEman!

The future of photography could be smaller, cheaper, less complex cameras

shree-nayar Shree Nayar at the CAVE lab, Columbia University [Jeffrey Schifman/Courtesy: Columbia Engineering]

Not often do you hear of Michel Foucault, Confucius, anaglyphs and Piet Mondrian in the span of an hour. Not often do you meet a computer scientist who wants you to look under the software, at the nuts and bolts. To touch. To feel. To put it together. To take it apart. Not often do you hear a Columbia professor calling himself an accidental academic. Shree K. Nayar is an uncommon man.

That wide grin and easygoing manner make it difficult for you to believe that this guy can make computers see. Director of the CAVE Laboratory at Columbia University, 50-year-old Nayar is also T.C. Chang professor of computer science there. CAVE and Nayar focus on “the creation of novel vision sensors, the design of physics based models for vision, and the development of algorithms for scene interpretation”. In English, it means that they help computers see better.

In school and university, Nayar played cricket and his coaches said he was good enough to turn pro. “My parents were not impressed,” he said. “I was not IPL material either.” So, he must have been an ace student. “No,” he said, “I was good enough, but not great, if you get the drift.” Conventional education and Nayar were not good friends. Throughout history, monotony has never interested seekers.

But how can a “good enough, but not great” guy head a Columbia department, and get elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2008), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011)? Nayar said he was influenced by his father, R.M. Nayar: “Being with him taught me more, through osmosis, than what I learnt in classrooms,” he said.

Nayar Sr once brought home a shell of an ancient Fiat 500 and installed it in the garage. Over the next few months, he and two others put together an engine with parts from different sources. Nayar Jr held flashlights, picked up dropped tools and, in the process, learnt a lot.

shree-nayar1 Shree Nayar [Jeffrey Schifman/Courtesy: Columbia Engineering]

One day, Nayar Sr took the family for a drive in the bug Fiat. “Then, I did not realise the magnitude of what he had done,” Nayar said. He tapped a water glass in front of him and said, “My father would know, instinctively, how much weight this would hold. He was an engineer’s engineer.”

“Disastrous” is how Nayar described his initial semesters at the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi. Then, Nayar Sr―who was about to retire as chairman, Electronics Trade and Technology Development Corporation Ltd, New Delhi―spoke his mind. “He told me that his career was coming to an end and that I would soon be on my own, and something clicked inside,” Nayar said of his Bodhi moment. In his final year, he made a robot that would go to the caller. It was the first of the many robots he would be friends with.

He did his MS at North Carolina State University and Ph.D at The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. “At Carnegie Mellon, I realised that robotics was a much more mature field than I had imagined it to be,” he said. In 1991, he moved to Columbia University and continued research on two pet topics―robots and the physics of vision. “Our attempt was to emulate human vision on a machine,” he said. Till then, robots ‘saw’ with cameras designed for television or photography. Instead, Nayar wanted to design new cameras that would help a robot see better. This sparked off his interest in 360-degree cameras and high-dynamic range cameras, and what could arguably be the future of photography.

“Philosophers like Foucault have suggested that human behaviour would change if they knew that they could be seen from all angles,” Nayar said. “Now, I am looking at you. Would your behaviour not change if I could see you from behind as well? It raises many questions in the domain of privacy, but it also answers many questions in the fields of security and robot navigation.” You could have eyes in the back of your head, literally.

High dynamic range cameras would sense brightness and colour beyond what usual cameras can. “The future of photography lies in capturing images that are much richer in information,” Nayar said. “For this, you need to develop new optics and new algorithms―together.” The lens would capture an image that would be coded; it would appear garbled to the eye, but would be packed with information. The camera would then run the image through an algorithm (read software), decoding it and making it ready for consumption. The result would be a billion pixel or “gigapixel” image of unprecedented quality. Billion pixel images would change the way a doctor sees a medical scan or the way remote sensing satellites see the earth.

Inspiration! Inspiration!

Hence, labs like CAVE have been focusing on computational imaging or computational photography. All major camera manufacturers send their researchers to Nayar’s lab, because the field has both consumer and scientific applications. “There is only so much you can do with the current camera obscura model,” Nayar said. So, cameras that reduce “cost, complexity and size, while offering new functions” are the future.

But, in 2008, a chance viewing of the documentary Born into Brothels moved Nayar. The documentary by Zana Brinski and Ross Kauffman had won the Oscar in 2005. Brinski, a documentary photographer, went to Kolkata to capture the lives of prostitutes, and ended up teaching photography to their children, changing their lives.

“Born into Brothels, for me, reaffirms what we all know about the camera,” Nayar told a TEDx audience. “It allows us to express ourselves, it allows us to communicate with each other, and using it is an emotional experience.” An inspired Nayar set out to combine two areas he knew well―cameras and education.

He wanted the camera to come as an affordable kit, and he wanted it to offer features that other cameras do not usually offer. And, the camera must, he decided, expose the user to all the technology that was at work inside the case. This was the beginning of the Bigshot camera project.

Camera biggies backed out of the project, because they had no exposure in the area of education. And, universities are hardly the place to launch a product. “We usually demonstrate a concept, write a paper on it and move on to the next big idea,” Nayar said. 

So, Nayar hunkered down and designed himself a do-it-yourself camera. To make it different, he sketched a round camera. Big question: would it roll away? A triangular camera? Big question: how do you know which way is the right way up? “And, eventually, I saw the wisdom of having a rectangular camera,” he quipped. After he had tested the prototype, Hong Kong-based Edu-Science offered to make it. In India, Bigshot is sold by Croma; price in the US is $89.

The camera comes as a kit of around 35 pieces. Assemble it, and you have a three-megapixel camera that can take a regular image, a 80-degree panoramic image and a 3D image. To switch between settings, you only have to twist the “Swiss Army” lens wheel.

Powered by a lithium battery, the camera also has a dynamo which can be cranked up if you run out of power. Is this a necessary feature for a camera? No, said Nayar, but it exposes the user to the concepts of a gearbox, power generation and electromagnetic induction.

Everything in the camera is designed to teach, and nothing illustrates this better than the site, www.bigshotcamera.com, which is an engaging, virtual physics textbook that Nayar developed with his students Guru Krishnan and Brian Smith.

A hobby painter, Nayar loves modern art. Ask for a favourite, and he names Mondrian. The Nayars―wife Kalpana, son Akash, 11, and, daughter Ahana, 8―sometimes visit museums in New York to see paintings. Recently, he saw the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the International Center of Photography, both in New York, selling the Bigshot in their stores. Nayar was overjoyed. Who would not be happy to see a piece of himself in a place he loves?

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