If only I had this when I was still riding ramps!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNL9kuWwFes (video no longer available)

NYTimes on Jim Parsons and Intel advertisements.

How Deep is Your Photography? by Intel (and Jim Parsons)

The three cameras shoot simultaneously, then combine the overlaid information to create an image file that has many more capabilities than a standard JPEG. Once an image is captured, it is processed into a high-quality, depth-mapped file.

“It creates a fat JPEG,” said Erhhung Yuan, system architect and lead developer for Intel RealSense snapshot. “It’s essentially a JPEG with more metadata fields, including the computed depth map.”

The ad is pretty cheesy, but the technology looks interesting. I can see smartphones having more cameras on the backside, and the “fat JPEGS” will require faster processors, more storage, and so on, pushing the limits of the devices even more.

(Revised and republished April 13th, 2025)