The Evolution of Smartphone Cameras: A Journey to Reality-Bending Photography

As I gaze at my Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra, I'm reminded of the endless possibilities that smartphone cameras have to offer. The phone's selfie camera is a perfect example of this, with features like beauty filters that can alter the shape and size of your face, change the color of your hair, and even apply makeup to your digital image. It's not just facial smoothing; it's an immersive experience that blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.

This technology isn't new, but rather a culmination of advancements in computational photography. Google's Pixel 6 is a prime example of this, with its ability to run the main camera at one shutter speed and the ultrawide camera at a much faster shutter speed simultaneously. This means that when you take a photo of a moving person, the phone can detect the face and merge a non-blurry copy from the ultrawide camera onto your subject, keeping just the face crisp and clear. All this happens in the background without you even asking, which raises an interesting question: where do we draw the line between human creativity and computational photography?

Facetime on iPhones already offers features like eye contact, which moves your pupils to make it look like you're making eye contact with the camera even when you're not looking at the screen. While this can be a bit eerie and slightly creepy, it's still a far cry from the more sinister possibilities that might lie ahead. Imagine, for instance, taking a group selfie shot where everyone has their face not blinking or smiling, but the software smartly goes through and merges the best smiling non-blinking face for everyone in the selfie – without even telling you. We've already seen versions of this working its way up to this feature, so it's not too far-fetched to predict that this is where smartphone cameras are headed.

In 2012, a Nokia Lumia phone had a selfie mode that allowed you to hold for five seconds and then scroll through five different faces of selfies to pick which one you liked best. It sounds crazy now, but it was a glimpse into the future. Fast forward to today, and we're on the cusp of a revolution where smartphone cameras can recognize all types of objects and situations around us. The AI mode is already impressive, recognizing sunsets and adjusting colors accordingly. But what if your camera could recognize Instagram-worthy spots and automatically adjust the image to make you look like you're standing in front of that iconic wall in Santa Monica?

This is where things get really interesting – or unsettling, depending on how you look at it. Imagine a world where your smartphone camera is constantly scanning its surroundings, recognizing landmarks, people, and objects, and morphing them into digital duplicates that blend seamlessly with reality. It's like living in a sci-fi movie where everything is tracked and analyzed by an omnipresent AI overlord. While this might sound like the stuff of dystopian fiction, it's hard to deny the allure of having a camera that can do all this for you.

As I sign off, I'm left with more questions than answers. Can we be comfortable with smartphone cameras spitting out finished images that are further and further from reality? Are we okay with surrendering our creative agency to machines that can process information at speeds and scales we can hardly comprehend? Or are we simply too blinded by the promise of perfection and convenience to stop and think about what's happening?

One thing is certain: the evolution of smartphone cameras will continue to push the boundaries of what's possible. As developers and manufacturers strive to create more sophisticated, AI-powered cameras that blur the lines between reality and fantasy, we're forced to confront our own relationship with technology. Will we be willing to accept a world where our digital images are constantly being tweaked and adjusted by algorithms, or will we demand a return to the raw, unedited beauty of human creativity? Only time – and perhaps a future generation of smartphone users – will tell.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a parting thought: as we hurtle towards this futuristic landscape, let's not forget that there's still value in the imperfections, quirks, and quirks of human creation. The imperfections that make us unique and beautiful can be lost forever in the pursuit of perfection. So, go ahead and take a selfie with your phone – but don't be surprised if it ends up being a masterpiece of computational photography, rather than a genuine representation of reality.

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So what do you think? Are you okay with smartphone cameras blurring the lines between reality and fantasy? Let us know in the comments below!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso there are three cameras on the back of the iphone 13 pro the main camera the ultra wide and the telephoto so this one down here at the bottom this is the main camera so if you cover it with your finger you can see the frame goes dark makes sense if you cover the other two nothing happens now when you hit that 3x button to zoom into 3x it's supposed to switch to that telephoto camera right but sometimes when you zoom into 3x and then cover the main camera it still goes dark why this is because the iphone's camera thinks it knows better than you and it usually does basically in certain conditions especially with lower light you could get a worse photo out of actually switching to the telephoto camera which is a smaller sensor with a smaller aperture that lets in less light and can be more noisy so sometimes when you hit that 3x it just crops in on the main big camera and doesn't even tell you and that's actually going to give you a better photo see smartphone cameras are smart but something i've been thinking a lot about lately is they've gone past smart they're bending reality so i'm in the middle of running the blind smartphone camera test over on instagram right now if you haven't already gotten in and start voting on those you should do it it's a fascinating experiment every time but a thought i've had is maybe it's not just the brightest photo that's going to win every single time so i actually think that similar to how in this tech bubble we underestimate how many people put cases on their phones at least i do there's also a bit of an underestimation of how many people want to just be able to take a photo and post it with zero edits now that's kind of crazy in the tech world or in the photography world we want the more neutral photo the one with more information and that's the better photo to us because then we can go take it and edit it and make it exactly how we want because we want that control but to most people if they can just take their phone and point and shoot and the photo that comes out of that is perfectly good enough to post with no edits at all that to them is a great camera and now you're letting of course the camera do all of the editing for you which means you have the least amount of control over the final look now the danger of giving up all the control is our photos become a product of someone else's vision technically and this is where it starts to get crazy because every smartphone company sees things a little differently right we already know a pixel photo looks different from an iphone photo which looks different from huawei phones which look different from xiaomi shots every picture is the result of an image processing pipeline that is tuned by people and that is a reflection of their biases and their skills and what they think we want which means every photo we take even if it's of the same thing will be slightly different just depending on what camera you take it with which one is real which one is the most accurate maybe it doesn't matter in 2019 the huawei p30 pro came out it had a pretty solid set of cameras it was a flagship phone of course so people went out and tested its limits and pretty quickly something sort of fishy came up so when you went outside at night and pointed the new periscope zoom camera at the moon and zoomed all the way in the camera would recognize the moon and suggest you turn moon mode on and people started doing this and posting their results and everyone's pictures of the moon looked surprisingly similar now maybe i should be shocked i mean we're all taking pictures of the same moon but have you ever tried to take a picture of the moon with your camera on your phone it's usually just a blob it never looks that good and these all looked really good maybe a little too good and that's what android authority concluded with enough samples they believe that huawei is using ai to not just recognize that you're taking a picture of the moon but also to then superimpose a stored image of the moon and merge it onto your photo now first glance that's pretty crazy but that's also kind of clever because the moon is tidally locked with the earth meaning one rotation takes the same amount of time as one orbit so one face of the moon is always pointing towards earth so you only see one side of the moon all the time meaning it's always going to look the same and you only need one stored image of the moon to superimpose over everyone's photos so maybe that's not so bad but huawei denied this of course but the seed was definitely planted and my take honestly at the time was like all right well you have this ai mode in your camera anyway and it's already recognizing scenes and adjusting things and changing things to enhance your photos already why not add a picture of the moon in there but it does bring up the question a totally fair question which is how far is too far like people already seem to want the most finished version of their photos straight out of camera and so you're doing edits and enhancements how far is too far xiaomi phones we already know can detect a landscape and make the blue sky bluer or they'll crank up the green on the green grass but also some of these phones from chinese vendors have very different acceptable levels of body and face adjustment so this xiaomi mi 11 ultra when you open the selfie camera has a beauty filter but this isn't just facial smoothing it literally lets you move your hairline changes the shape of your chin and your nose it can slender up your face it changes the size of your lips and your cheeks it can make your eyes bigger or smaller and you can put makeup on yourself and it's all just built into the camera out the box and is totally normal and accepted kind of reminds me of uh when there was a sort of a commercialized version of this when the galaxy s9 in the united states had a bixby vision feature to try on makeup and then you could swap between different shades of lipstick and blush and eye shadow and then bixby would give you a link to buy the actual retail version of that makeup but really the most powerful adjustments are the ones that happen when you don't even know it and you didn't even ask for it they happen in the background it's the highest level of computational photography so google's pixel 6 is always running the main camera at one shutter speed and the ultrawide camera at a much faster shutter speed at the same time so if you take a photo of a moving person the phone detects the face realizes if it's blurry it can take a non-blurry copy from the ultrawide camera and merge it onto your subject to keep just the face crisp and clear all of this happens in the background without you even asking there's also already a feature in facetime on iphones called eye contact that moves your pupils to make it look like you're making eye contact with the camera even though you're not you're looking at the screen below the camera but it's pretty eerie and slightly creepy and it works a little too well but at least you can turn it off and i could swear this was a feature somewhere i must have been imagining a keynote but i can't find it anywhere so i'm going to predict that this future will exist at some point in some phone probably in something like a pixel first imagine you're taking a group selfie shot there's a bunch of people with you you hit the shutter button and almost everyone has their face not blinking and smiling but at different moments everyone has sort of their ideal face so the software smartly goes through and merges the best smiling non-blinking face for everyone in the selfie doesn't even tell you just does it in the background we've actually seen versions of this working our way up to this feature so believe it or not in 2012 a nokia lumia phone had a selfie mode where you'd hold for five seconds and then after the shot you could scroll between five different faces of selfies to pick which one you like the best so it sounds crazy but that's the thought i've been having is this is the direction smartphone cameras are going which is as computational photography gets better and better and we're merging more and more things in eventually these cameras are outputting captures of moments in time that never really happened so it's easy to see a future where smartphone cameras just recognize all kinds of things like ai mode right now is pretty basic it'll see a sunset and make the oranges brighter but maybe it'll start recognizing all types of objects you're uh you're in front of a popular instagram wall in santa monica somewhere and it notices you take a picture in front of it it's like oh i have a downloaded picture of that in our database and it just wipes out all the people in the background and makes you perfectly flat on that image without you even asking that could happen in the future at that point basically the whole world turns into ai recognizable qr codes where your ai camera is just being triggered by all sorts of objects and things around you to morph into recognized situations it is kind of crazy to think about but while we're in this new reflective mode shout out to new channel sponsor cash app cash app i'd say is just the right level of futuristic so it's already a great app for sending and requesting money from your friends or you get dinner with somebody and just want to reimburse them that's easy but you can also buy stocks or buy bitcoin with it so if you haven't already signed up feel free to use the link below or my code marquez and 15 bucks will just appear in your account you're welcome also 10 will go to girls who code but yeah my take is i don't have a solution for this eerily dystopian smartphone camera future but i wonder are you okay with smartphone cameras spitting out finished images that are further and further from reality they're basically bending the definition of a photo let me know what you think either way that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peaceso there are three cameras on the back of the iphone 13 pro the main camera the ultra wide and the telephoto so this one down here at the bottom this is the main camera so if you cover it with your finger you can see the frame goes dark makes sense if you cover the other two nothing happens now when you hit that 3x button to zoom into 3x it's supposed to switch to that telephoto camera right but sometimes when you zoom into 3x and then cover the main camera it still goes dark why this is because the iphone's camera thinks it knows better than you and it usually does basically in certain conditions especially with lower light you could get a worse photo out of actually switching to the telephoto camera which is a smaller sensor with a smaller aperture that lets in less light and can be more noisy so sometimes when you hit that 3x it just crops in on the main big camera and doesn't even tell you and that's actually going to give you a better photo see smartphone cameras are smart but something i've been thinking a lot about lately is they've gone past smart they're bending reality so i'm in the middle of running the blind smartphone camera test over on instagram right now if you haven't already gotten in and start voting on those you should do it it's a fascinating experiment every time but a thought i've had is maybe it's not just the brightest photo that's going to win every single time so i actually think that similar to how in this tech bubble we underestimate how many people put cases on their phones at least i do there's also a bit of an underestimation of how many people want to just be able to take a photo and post it with zero edits now that's kind of crazy in the tech world or in the photography world we want the more neutral photo the one with more information and that's the better photo to us because then we can go take it and edit it and make it exactly how we want because we want that control but to most people if they can just take their phone and point and shoot and the photo that comes out of that is perfectly good enough to post with no edits at all that to them is a great camera and now you're letting of course the camera do all of the editing for you which means you have the least amount of control over the final look now the danger of giving up all the control is our photos become a product of someone else's vision technically and this is where it starts to get crazy because every smartphone company sees things a little differently right we already know a pixel photo looks different from an iphone photo which looks different from huawei phones which look different from xiaomi shots every picture is the result of an image processing pipeline that is tuned by people and that is a reflection of their biases and their skills and what they think we want which means every photo we take even if it's of the same thing will be slightly different just depending on what camera you take it with which one is real which one is the most accurate maybe it doesn't matter in 2019 the huawei p30 pro came out it had a pretty solid set of cameras it was a flagship phone of course so people went out and tested its limits and pretty quickly something sort of fishy came up so when you went outside at night and pointed the new periscope zoom camera at the moon and zoomed all the way in the camera would recognize the moon and suggest you turn moon mode on and people started doing this and posting their results and everyone's pictures of the moon looked surprisingly similar now maybe i should be shocked i mean we're all taking pictures of the same moon but have you ever tried to take a picture of the moon with your camera on your phone it's usually just a blob it never looks that good and these all looked really good maybe a little too good and that's what android authority concluded with enough samples they believe that huawei is using ai to not just recognize that you're taking a picture of the moon but also to then superimpose a stored image of the moon and merge it onto your photo now first glance that's pretty crazy but that's also kind of clever because the moon is tidally locked with the earth meaning one rotation takes the same amount of time as one orbit so one face of the moon is always pointing towards earth so you only see one side of the moon all the time meaning it's always going to look the same and you only need one stored image of the moon to superimpose over everyone's photos so maybe that's not so bad but huawei denied this of course but the seed was definitely planted and my take honestly at the time was like all right well you have this ai mode in your camera anyway and it's already recognizing scenes and adjusting things and changing things to enhance your photos already why not add a picture of the moon in there but it does bring up the question a totally fair question which is how far is too far like people already seem to want the most finished version of their photos straight out of camera and so you're doing edits and enhancements how far is too far xiaomi phones we already know can detect a landscape and make the blue sky bluer or they'll crank up the green on the green grass but also some of these phones from chinese vendors have very different acceptable levels of body and face adjustment so this xiaomi mi 11 ultra when you open the selfie camera has a beauty filter but this isn't just facial smoothing it literally lets you move your hairline changes the shape of your chin and your nose it can slender up your face it changes the size of your lips and your cheeks it can make your eyes bigger or smaller and you can put makeup on yourself and it's all just built into the camera out the box and is totally normal and accepted kind of reminds me of uh when there was a sort of a commercialized version of this when the galaxy s9 in the united states had a bixby vision feature to try on makeup and then you could swap between different shades of lipstick and blush and eye shadow and then bixby would give you a link to buy the actual retail version of that makeup but really the most powerful adjustments are the ones that happen when you don't even know it and you didn't even ask for it they happen in the background it's the highest level of computational photography so google's pixel 6 is always running the main camera at one shutter speed and the ultrawide camera at a much faster shutter speed at the same time so if you take a photo of a moving person the phone detects the face realizes if it's blurry it can take a non-blurry copy from the ultrawide camera and merge it onto your subject to keep just the face crisp and clear all of this happens in the background without you even asking there's also already a feature in facetime on iphones called eye contact that moves your pupils to make it look like you're making eye contact with the camera even though you're not you're looking at the screen below the camera but it's pretty eerie and slightly creepy and it works a little too well but at least you can turn it off and i could swear this was a feature somewhere i must have been imagining a keynote but i can't find it anywhere so i'm going to predict that this future will exist at some point in some phone probably in something like a pixel first imagine you're taking a group selfie shot there's a bunch of people with you you hit the shutter button and almost everyone has their face not blinking and smiling but at different moments everyone has sort of their ideal face so the software smartly goes through and merges the best smiling non-blinking face for everyone in the selfie doesn't even tell you just does it in the background we've actually seen versions of this working our way up to this feature so believe it or not in 2012 a nokia lumia phone had a selfie mode where you'd hold for five seconds and then after the shot you could scroll between five different faces of selfies to pick which one you like the best so it sounds crazy but that's the thought i've been having is this is the direction smartphone cameras are going which is as computational photography gets better and better and we're merging more and more things in eventually these cameras are outputting captures of moments in time that never really happened so it's easy to see a future where smartphone cameras just recognize all kinds of things like ai mode right now is pretty basic it'll see a sunset and make the oranges brighter but maybe it'll start recognizing all types of objects you're uh you're in front of a popular instagram wall in santa monica somewhere and it notices you take a picture in front of it it's like oh i have a downloaded picture of that in our database and it just wipes out all the people in the background and makes you perfectly flat on that image without you even asking that could happen in the future at that point basically the whole world turns into ai recognizable qr codes where your ai camera is just being triggered by all sorts of objects and things around you to morph into recognized situations it is kind of crazy to think about but while we're in this new reflective mode shout out to new channel sponsor cash app cash app i'd say is just the right level of futuristic so it's already a great app for sending and requesting money from your friends or you get dinner with somebody and just want to reimburse them that's easy but you can also buy stocks or buy bitcoin with it so if you haven't already signed up feel free to use the link below or my code marquez and 15 bucks will just appear in your account you're welcome also 10 will go to girls who code but yeah my take is i don't have a solution for this eerily dystopian smartphone camera future but i wonder are you okay with smartphone cameras spitting out finished images that are further and further from reality they're basically bending the definition of a photo let me know what you think either way that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peace\n"