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This is a demonstration of Virtual Light, a night vision program for the iPhone. Now,
there's many night vision programs out there, and … some of them better than others, many
of them are not very good at all. But the best ones amplify light.
Night Vision apps for the iPhone try to improve low-light photography by boosting the pictures.
And they do this in various ways and some are better than others.
And Virtual Light is pretty good. Does the most with the light, Does the most processing,
maintains color, so you don't get green unless you really want green. There's a green mode,
a red mode and a blue mode. But most of the time, you're going to want simple amplification
of color.
So, the upper left hand corner of the screen, is picture-in-picture. So that shows you the
original image. This is the before, and this is the after.
It takes a few seconds to get a really good image. And this is because, very much like
photomultiplier tubes that became common in the second World War, Virtual Light essentially
makes better use of the light that's coming into the sensor. It bounces it around mathematically,
instead of physically.
So right off the bat, you can see that there's - almost no information, there's very little,
very dark red information coming in. And Virtual Light is able to process that, handle it,
clean it up, maintain and balance the colors, and give you an image that you can take a
picture of at anytime.
And it handles this in realtime, so - you know, there's no waiting around in Photoshop.
And in fact, Photoshop cannot even do what Virtual Light can do. And the reason for that
is that Photoshop deals with single frames, one at a time. And in Virtual Light, we're
using sequential frames to build up - almost a database of the image that's really out
there, and adjust it as needs be.
So, you can go from something that's - that's just, just too dark to come through, to something
that will communicate to another person. They'll be able to say "Oh, … this color is different
from this color." which really would not be possible without the color-balancing features
of Virtual Light.
And of course, you can zoom in. And when you zoom in, you'll see that - this is a very
low resolution image. And the reason is, we want to handle this, do as much processing,
as quickly as possible. So we sacrifice resolution for speed.
What you will see, as we go from dark spots to lighter spots in the original scene, you
can see that Virtual Light is … it's not necessary when you're pointing at a scene
with a lot of light. So - it will actually turn itself off, gradually, and return the
view to the original information.
Virtual Light will not work in pitch blackness, nothing can, because there's no light coming
in - but when there is a little light, it's going to make the best use of it of any program
out there.
The whole idea is to help you communicate with other people. To help you say, "Hey!
I saw this." Things that you can see with your eyes, you'll notice that you, very often,
you can't see with a digital camera, because their night vision just isn't very strong.
Well, Virtual Light goes about halfway toward seeing things that you can see, but your camera
can't. Such as, oh, evening time, dusk or dawn, there'll be areas where, you'll be able
to see stuff, but your camera can't. But, with Virtual Light, you'll be able to share
that image with other people.
Finally, there's a tuning panel down here to let you turn on and off some of the 12
amplification stages that make Virtual Light so good. It's usually best just to tap the
"Night" button, and to leave things on their "Night" setting. Everything in the system
is balanced to make that default - just the best, the best that you could get.
So in the end, you have a realtime system to let your iPhone see at night.