The crucial footage for breaking news reports often comes from eye witnesses, “citizen journalists,” using their smartphones. While these videos often do not meet the quality standards set by news organizations, there is a hesitation to perform much post-processing to improve the content — in the spirit of being accurate and truthful. With their Magic Grant, two Computer Scientists, Jane E and Ohad Fried, will help people capture higher quality content and, ultimately, contribute more impactful, immediate, on-scene documentation of breaking events. E and Fried will create tools that overlay directly on the screen of a traditional camera, dynamically augmenting the current view of a scene with information that will help people make better photo capture decisions. “Our hope is that such interfaces will empower users to be more intentional about their storytelling and artistic decisions while taking photos.”
