A year or so, I was getting into digital video cameras and was thinking how great it would be to have an open-source camera platform. The hardware design and low-level driver stuff would be implemented already, so people could easily build their own dream camera software. There's already some precedent for this, with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II "Magic Lantern" firmware, which is a truly amazing work of reverse-engineering. But because the 5D Mark II is closed hardware, there's still a limit to what the Magic Lantern people can do.

Well, I saw on SlashDot today that some researchers at Stanford plan to offer a Frankencamera, an inexpensive, open platform for still camera algorithm development. I'm anxious to see this camera produced and what people will do with it.