"Not Fish. Snake scale!"

So for those of you who remember that scene in Blade Runner when Deckard is examining the photo of the replicants using a computer that allows him to see things in such detail (and around corners) that you never would have known they were there otherwise...

I had to think how close to reality that concept is now with the Gigapan camera. (Although you can't tell it "Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance. Stop." and have it listen to your voice. Yet.)

I heard a piece from PRI's The World yesterday where they described this device and what it can do. It's what's been used to create Google Earth, and maybe half the people (which would make 1 or 2 people) who read this blog have already heard of this long ago (I'm slow to catch on to these things), but still. This is, to me, anyway, SO AMAZING.

The camera is being used in a joint project from Carnegie Mellon University, NASA, Google, and National Geographic. The home page for the project is here. Check out the links to panoramas to see how incredible this tool is. As the team explains:

The project's long-term goal is to help us learn about and meet our neighbors across this globe, and learn about our planet itself.

The team is motivated by the desire to encourage global citizenship and understanding by connecting people, places and events through the utilization, exploration and sharing of dynamically viewable images.

A consumer version of the device is coming, as is are software tools to use in conjunction with it, and instructions for making your own, apparently.

And if I read slashdot more often than once in 2 years, I would have seen their article about Microsoft Live Lab's Photosynth, a software which "takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next."

As a kid, I loved to read science fiction. As a teen and young adult, I wrote science fiction. Now, it seems, so much of that fiction has become fact. There's a whole blog entry (or several) I could write about this, including what's happening on Mars. (D. is the expert on that.)

There's still plenty to explore, plenty of ideas to put forth that won't exist for a long time. There's still science fiction to write. It hasn't all come true yet.

But what an age we're living in!