14 DAY TRIAL // A new, open-source digital photography platform is now available as a free download for the owners of a Nokia N900 handset, namely FCam, (short for ‘Frankencamera’). Released as the result of a collaboration from Stanford University and Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, the solution offers developers the possibility to tap into new functionalities for digital cameras, while enabling users to benefit from a series of new photography apps.
FCam came to light as part of the Camera 2.0 project, and was created via a partnership between Nokia, Stanford, and other partners. The new solution is meant to enable the creation of new digital camera applications that would provide users with the ability to overcome some limitations of their handset's camera. Moreover, the platform can enable the creation of new types of imagery.
“The N900 is a camera phone, but it runs a version of Linux almost as complete as that installed on personal computers,” Nokia Fellow Kari Pulli stated, explaining this way why the high-end mobile phone was selected for the creation of the new FCam platform. According to a recent post on Nokia Conversations, researchers managed to create a series of new photography apps for the platform, and they already made some of them available for download.
Among the new apps, we can count Fcamera, Low-light Assistant and HDR Capture, which were made available as free downloads from the FCam project pages. The first of them is a camera app based on FCam libraries and drivers; the second comes as a helpful solution for cases when there is not enough light for taking good photos, while the last one is meant for situations when there is too much light.
“Photo-trickery is also on the cards. One of the applications described in a research paper captured the position and trajectory of playing cards thrown into the air with complete clarity through the use of two flash units, each behaving independently. The paper will be presented next week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. The hope, though, is that once FCam is in the public domain, Nokia developers and camera programmers will work to create a whole new class of programmable camera applications which will be gathered together on the project web site,” the Nokia Conversations post continues.