Lighting is
crucial to the art of photography. But lights are cumbersome and time-consuming
to set up, and outside the studio, it can be prohibitively difficult to
position them where, ideally, they ought to go. Researchers at MIT and Cornell
University hope to change that by providing photographers with squadrons of
small, light-equipped autonomous robots that automatically assume the positions
necessary to produce lighting effects specified through a simple, intuitive,
camera-mounted interface. They take the first step toward realizing this
vision, presenting a prototype system that uses an autonomous helicopter to
produce a difficult effect called ‘rim lighting’ in which only the edge of the
photographer’s subject is strongly lit.
With the new
system, the photographer indicates the direction from which the rim light
should come, and the miniature helicopter flies to that side of the subject.
The photographer then specifies the width of the rim as a percentage of its
initial value, repeating that process until the desired effect is achieved. Thereafter,
the robot automatically maintains the specified rim width. If somebody is
facing you, the rim you would see is on the edge of the shoulder, but if the
subject turns sideways, so that he’s looking 90 degrees away from you, then
he’s exposing his chest to the light, which means that you’ll see a much
thicker rim light. So in order to compensate for the change in the body, the
light has to change its position quite dramatically.
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