You know what the internet loves? Nostalgia. Seriously. I mean, have you ever heard of Tumblr? It’s full of people posting ads and pin-up girls from 50 years ago.
You know what else the web adores? Mash-ups. Mix-up anything online, whether a Ke$ha track or a cat and a parrot, and people will go nuts for it.
So really, this new camera app from those crazy kids at MIT should, in theory anyway, make the internet explode. It’s still in its prototype phase at the moment, so it currently requires a laptop connected to a camera, but what it essentially does is direct your camera to the exact co-ordinates of a pre-existing historical photo of that spot.
So, say you’re in Paris and you would love to compare your own shot to the same scene a hundred years ago? (You’re an internet geek, I take it?) The app will send you the best position and zoom to get a matching shot.
In the future, the folks at MIT expect that, rather than lugging around a laptop around, the technology will simply be built into the camera as an app. Though really, knowing those people at MIT, what they actually meant was “we’ll put a chip in your brain and then send you out to do surveillance for us”. Or, that’s what I assume.
Cool! I actually did a project in design school with the same idea a couple of years ago. The grand scheme had it accumulating photos based on geographical position so future generations can compare what was happening at that time in the same place. Video here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGvKF2MXEY