LSD for your Monitor

If you've ever tried to calibrate your computer's display to match what comes out of the printer, you know that one of the biggest things you have to pay attention to is the ambient lighting in the room. Turn the lights up or down from where they were when you did your calibration and it your efforts immediately become inaccurate. A similar problem occurs when you are viewing images that come over the Internet or from other sources. If the lights around your monitor are bright and the image on your screen is shrouded in dim light, it can make you wish you had a dimmer switch that made things brighter within the image so that you can see the details you're interested in. A team of researchers led by a Columbia University computer scientist is trying to solve the latter problem by developing a lighting sensitive computer display that senses the illumination of the display's surroundings and makes adjustments that can make it seem like the lights in your room are illuminating what you're seeing on screen. The new technology is called Lighting Sensitive Displays (LSD) and the developers say it enables, for example, a digital image of a museum sculpture on a computer display to have the colors, shadings, highlights, and shadows needed to make the sculpture look like it was lit by the surroundings of the display. The sensing technologies are embedded within the display device and can come in different forms - an arrangement of compact photo-sensitive detectors over and around the display device, optical fibers distributed around the device, or wide-angle camera systems placed close to the device. The measured illumination field can be used to modify the displayed content, depending on whether the content is a two-dimensional image, a three-dimensional scene, or a combination of both. The research program at Columbia has already developed several advanced digital imaging technologies, including 360-degree immersive imaging techniques that allow internet or television viewers to see images in all directions at once, and high dynamic range imaging methods that allow cameras to capture a much broader range of light and color variations. Much like the pan and zoom features available in the DVD specification, you can bet the purveyors of porn are paying attention to this new development. Think dark room. Think flashlight. And remember that porn has a tendency to push technology. Hell, I had to take this story into the gutter. I started out with a drug reference didn't I?