Motion Pictures
You’re looking at a photo of some van Gogh sunflowers, and the flowers start to sway on their long stalks as if stirred by a breeze. No, it’s not an LSD flashback; it’s the product of new image-editing tools developed at the University of Washington and Microsoft.

With the tools, a user can divide a digital still image into layers and assign a different action to each layer. In a photograph of a sailboat, for example, a swaying motion could be applied to the boat and a sideways motion to the clouds; the water, meanwhile, could be animated by algorithms that produce small distortions resembling ripples. The result can be played in a digital picture frame or as a desktop background or screensaver on a PC. The tools are experimental but might eventually be included in products, says lead researcher Richard Szeliski.

Researchers at the Technical Research Centre of Finland, the University of Kuopio, and the Helsinki School of Economics collaborated to develop the technology and recently completed field testing. The system, which could be deployed in Finland in two years, also allows users to access logs that list their food purchases at any time via the Internet.