[itchyjunk]

There are obvious(?) privacy issues and what not here. But ignoring all that for a second, it does sound pretty cool to be able to leverage all the little computers we walk around with.

Think of all those shitty little video clips people take at a concert. Could all those be combined to make some high quality panoramic video? Probably a lot of other cool applications that I can't even comprehend for now. What a time to be alive.

[crazygringo]

> Think of all those shitty little video clips people take at a concert. Could all those be combined to make some high quality panoramic video?

People definitely have created very cool, close to seeming professionally-produced, full-length concert films out of tens of separate YouTube uploads. It takes a lot of editing skill though.

An actual 3D panorama is vastly harder, but remember Microsoft PhotoSynth? That rendered a 3D point cloud out of hundreds/thousands of tourist photos, and positioned the photos from where they were taken.

[kick]

Panoramic no (panoramas work on a single axis), but interesting despite that.

One of the applications for a thing like that would be creating 3D environments of concerts and other historical events that were fairly accurate from any angle, though, which could have some pretty interesting effects (could you imagine how interesting it would be if you could watch old concerts of dead artists, or a politician's speech from a hundred years ago, with 6 degrees of freedom, "accurate to the millimeter!" or something?) and outcomes and so on. Much more interesting historical record-keeping.

[jcims]

The word(s) for your 3d application is photogrammetry and/or videogrammetry.

[kick]

Thank you!

[stallmanite]

It was more premeditated than what you describe but the Beastie Boys handed out hundreds of cameras before a show in Madison Square Garden in 2006 and then post-processed the resulting footage into a pretty epic concert film.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awesome;_I_Fuckin'_Shot_That!

[eeZah7Ux]

Phones and servers in the offices have more than enough processing power to do this, without the cloud surveillance service.

Also, it's been done by sound engineers for decades.

[ape4]

Sounds like they aren't using any computing power of the little computing devices.

[ComodoHacker]

Looks like they're going to leverage only our microphones, not the computers. Just another plausible way to suck even more data into the cloud.

[m463]

"Going forward, we will fund business ideas that: allow microphone access, allow camera access, allow location services, allow calendar access, allow..."

It's like webex - it turns on 24x7 microphone access "to detect nearby video devices"

[amelius]

> What a time to be alive.

This technology was already available in the 60s with Kalman filters.

[adrianmonk]

The key word here is "available". Computers were available in the 1960s as well, but there wasn't one in everybody's pocket.

The innovation here seems to be primarily about making this available in circumstances where it wouldn't otherwise be.