Sunday, November 30, 2008

Discovered: A Hidden Video of a Squid

On Greg Laden's blog is the following video.  It was created late last year and was just recently discovered floating around the internet as an email attatchment.






Now, a "Shell Oil submersible robot" filmed the squid.  I don't know if it was attempting to do this unaided or if someone was at the controls (I'm sure it has to be the latter), but after watching the video I had an idea.  The video is badly shot with the squid out of many scense as if someone with no experience was attempting to control it. So the idea I had was to figure out how a computer could automate the actual filming.

This robot, not completely autonomous, would have the ability to follow the subject (squid) by first having someone point to it and then locking on to it.  After that the subject would always be in the scene and either the onboard computer, given a general description (script) of how to behave, could film the squid entirely autonomously.  Or, once locked in and filming, someone could feed it commands or take manual control of the camera and move it about.  Some of these commands might be able to control the camera in the following ways: zoom out, zoom in, hold, pan up, pan down, pan left, pan right, etc.

Anyway, this is my idead.

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