Memory Metadata

Summary

memory metadata Livia Foldes This is a photograph I took of my sister holding my niece. I took it at her apartment, just after I moved to New York last summer. When I look at it, I remember the thick feeling of the humid August air. I see my sister’s tender expression, and how much my niece has grown in the months since then. 1pixels But there are many other ways to see this photo. When I ask my Macbook’s operating system to ‘Get Info,’ I can see when it was taken, the device it was taken on, and more. I can see that its 7,990,272 pixels use 1,287,199 bytes of memory. I can open the photo in Photoshop and enlarge it until I see the places where the algorithm in my iPhone’s camera guessed at the colors it couldn’t see in the living room’s dim, late afternoon light. I can zoom in until I see the individual pixels. I can select a single pixel, and see the different formulas my computer uses to translate that pixel’s data into color. 2place My iPhone remembers where I took the photo. In Google Maps, I can see a photograph of the exact spot. The photograph has so many pixels that I can see my sister’s living room where I took the photo. This photo has metadata, too. It was taken by an employee of Google in June, 2019. Over the last eleven years, someone has photographed her street eight times, at semi-regular intervals. A Street View car; a closeup of its camera; and a “visualization of the spatial coverage of each camera.”Credit: Google AI blog Separate images from Street View’s “rosette” camera being algorithmically “stitched together”Credit: Google AI blog The rectangular boundaries of the images I pulled from Street View are arbitrary; the engineer and the research scientist demonstrate the algorithms they use to eliminate “visible seams” from this boundless digital representation of our world. Depth sensors added to Street View camerasCredit: Wired 3vision Promotional image of Waymo carCredit: Waymo In its website’s FAQs, Waymo (a subsidiary of Alphabet) describes i...