Camcorder of the future

I was browsing one of the many Holiday catalogs that we get at this time of the year over the weekend and -- much to my surprise -- I found this JVC camcorder which has implemented (and prominently advertised, see sticker) the ability to upload videos to YouTube with the press of a button.

Leaving out the fact that many other camcorders have recently offered that feature as well, it brought back fond memories of an assignment form my 'Video Processing' class in which, back in the beginning of 2007, I asked my students the question:

If you had to design the ‘(consumer-level) camcorder of year 2010’ what would its technical specs look like? Be technical and precise and think about all relevant aspects (resolution, media format, lenses, and much more… ‘Upload to YouTube’ button, anyone?). Feel free to use the tech specs of a contemporary camera as a starting point an/or basis for comparison.

At that time I felt I was venturing into futuristic terrain... It turns out I was just looking ahead 15 months or so... :-)

For those among you who are more adventurous (and want to look as far ahead as 20 years), I recommend taking a peek at MIT Professor Ramesh Raskar's 'Camera Culture' course and two of its assignments:

What will a camera look like in 10 years, 20 years?
and
What will be in Photoshop2028?

Course

My course on 'Selected Topics in Visual Information Retrieval' started very well and seems to be moving forward at a very high speed. Here are some highlights:

• I have a small but very qualified group of students: 10 in total, three of which are PhD students.
  
• They are all busy working on their implementation-oriented projects and the partial results (I've divided the project into milestones to better check their progress and help them along the way) are very encouraging.
  
• Due to limited classroom availability, the class meets in different rooms and buildings depending on the day, for a total of seven different classrooms. Talk about a great way to learn my way around campus... :-)
  
• Speaking of classrooms, an interesting story: before my first lecture I wanted to check if the classroom had projector, etc. I was told how to look up this information online. To my surprise, they have a system that contains that information and much more... Starting from the course page, when one clicks on the classroom number, a popup window shows information about the resources available in that room, and -- in the best German / Austrian tradition -- detailed quantitative information about the room's length, width, total area, number of seats, etc. Great!
  
• I'm using Moodle (in German!), which is a great CMS tool for online learning (that I was scheduled to test drive at FAU in the Fall anyway, so I'm enjoying the head start, even if some things have been learned by trial-and-error due to my notoriously limited knowledge of the German language).