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    This Could Be Big
    • Never Worry About Focusing Your Camera Again

      Inside an unassuming 8 ounce body, Lytro hides technology that a decade ago required a room full of cameras tethered to a supercomputer.

      Lytro is a new camera that looks like it was designed to fool you. On the outside it looks like a toy with a simple rectangular body, but on the inside it's the first consumer camera that can capture the entire light field, which means it can capture all the light traveling at every point in space.

      Capturing the entire light field with a pocket size camera was made possible by shrinking down that room full of cameras attached to a supercomputer into a paper thin light field sensor.

      By capturing the entire light field, the Lytro enables you to take a picture without setting the focus before you take your picture. Instead you simply snap a photo, and adjust the focus when you get home.

      Don't waste time focusing and worry more about capturing that picture of your kid before they stop smiling, and stop being cute.

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    • The World’s Fastest Camera

      It's difficult to imagine how a camera could possibly capture a trillion frames per second. The idea that anything can happen a trillion times in the space of a second is difficult to rationalize, but at the MIT Media Lab they have built a camera that can, and in doing so have redefined slow motion photography.

      It's fitting that the evolution of slow motion photography would take place at MIT, where 50 years ago Professor Harold 'Doc' Edgerton revolutionized the technique when he took a famous photograph of a bullet being shot through an apple, a style that's been frequently duplicated since.

      The new camera is so fast that it can produce a slow motion video of a burst of light traveling from the length of one-liter water bottle, bounce off the cap and travel back to the bottom of the bottle.

      We stopped by the lab of Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar and postdoctoral researcher Andreas Velten, the creators of the camera, to see their work first hand.

      This is our final segment in a 6

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    • How to Grow a Salad in Your Window

      First pass under a rumbling elevated subway and then walk up five flights of stairs, there you'll find a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables growing in an apartment window. Chives, red leaf lettuce, sage, basil, even strawberries, all growing above each other and next to each other like Hollywood squares.

      We're in the Brooklyn apartment of Britta Riley, the founder of Windowfarms and she's invited us to her Brooklyn loft to check out the future of urban, home farming.

      A Windowfarm is a vertical hydroponic farm that's set up in a window and can grow certain fruits, vegetables and herbs year round based on the season, even in winter. To feed the plants, a clear plastic tube is connected to a pump on a timer that circulates a nutrient rich solution directly to your plants root systems.

      Up until now, Windowfarms have all been homemade, crafted from plastic bottles and other materials listed on the open source Windowfarms website free for anyone to use. There are already nearly 25,000

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    • See-Through Tablets in 2012?

      While tablets are at the cutting edge of modern technology, Samsung Mobile Display wants to make the iPad look about as modern as the Ford Model T.

      This week we got our hands on a Samsung commercial released in Korea for a see-through, flexible tablet that's unlike anything we've ever seen here at This Could Be Big, and we knew we had to find out more.

      The big question is, could this thing be real?

      Looking at the commercial it looks like it's out of a preview for the new Mission Impossible movie. It's a thin piece of glass that's as flexible as jell-o and can be rolled up like a newspaper. It's also expandable, 3-D and can be used as a real time translator.

      Samsung Mobile Display is keeping their lips sealed for now, but expect more from them at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

      For now, to help uncover the mystery, we spoke with technology journalist Joanna Stern from the TheVerge.com to shine some light on this futuristic technology.

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    • A Step Towards Safer Motorcycle Riding

      Engineers have been searching for years for a way to make motorcycle riding, an inherently dangerous hobby, a little bit safer.

      Options have ranged from thicker jackets to actual airbags inside the motorcycle, akin to a car, but I don't have to tell you the dangers of having an inflatable bag that propels out towards the rider in a vehicle lacking safety restraints.

      Now there are two companies, Dainese and Alpinestars, who are developing wearable jackets that inflate via micro sensors that detect impact and take less than a second to achieve maximum size. While not yet available in America, they give hope for every rider who has taken a spill... or thought about taking a spill, but were too afraid.

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