Invention Idea a long time ahead: Vector Photography and Video

I just had an idea for a technology I think should / could eventually exist. I’m not remotely smart enough to invent it myself, but I wanna type it here so if it ever gets made and someone gets super rich, I have “I thought of that” bragging rights. I’d invite you to check it out and share your thoughts.

When you take a photo or video on any digital camera, the image appears as a raster. Basically this means it’s a rectangular grid of pixels, and no matter how high the quality of the camera (which I have no doubt will increase over time), you can always zoom in close enough and see rectangular elements of color.

The world isn’t actually pixelated. No matter how close you look at something, it never turns into rectangular components. So cameras are not a perfect representation, no matter how good.

Graphic design, 3D models, etc use vectors, which means you make an image on the computer and the computer understands it as smooth, not a series of pixels.

So like a photo of a real circle you can zoom in and see squares, but a digital circle you can zoom in forever and it stays round.

So what I think should / could exist some day is VECTOR PHOTOGRAPHY. Currently one can falsely “vectorize a raster,” but it isn’t really a vector. It’s a computer making guesses. But what if there was a camera that understood what it was filming, analyzed what it saw in real time, had perfect automatic focus, and could actually understand the lines in front of it. If a camera could produce a vector, a digital file that fully understands what it saw and can process it immediately into shapes rather than pixels, then you’d have the sharpest real-life image in the world. No matter how far you zoom, no pixel.

Now granted, it could never invent detail that the camera can’t see. It’s not like you can zoom in forever and see molecules. But for a movie on the big screen, tech like this could yield the most crisp image theoretically possible.

I could be wrong. Comment your ideas if you bothered reading; there’s probably a million reasons this couldn’t work in theory or practice, or criticisms of whether what I described would even be a vector. But I just wanted to jot it down in case someone becomes millionaire with this concept.