Yesterday, Snap (formerly known as Snapchat) went public and raised a whopping $3.4 billion dollars that valued the company at over $24 billion dollars. It was a confluence of events that the public debut of “the camera company” coincided with some personal good news. After a gap of nearly 15 years I am going to publish a book. 

I have signed a contract with Harper Business, an imprint of Harper Collins and will be writing a book that is an exploration of the profound cultural shift in which the image, and our place in its capture and dissemination, has become the fundamental driver of technology, business, and our future. It is tentatively called The Third Eye Era.

As per Wikipedia, according to ancient Hindu Vedic texts, “the third eye (also called the mind’s eye, or inner eye) is a mystical concept that is about an invisible eye that provides perception beyond ordinary sight.” In our modern world, the phone and its camera has become a virtual third eye, providing us a radically new context for shaping everything from art and self to reality itself.

The book is a culmination of a lot of my thinking and writing around photography, rise of computational photography, visual computing and how it leads us to the idea of an augmented reality — with what we think of camera as a portal into our digital interactions. I am going to start reporting and building a narrative around this and will take you along on this journey here, on this blog.

I want this book to be chockfull of stories, anecodotes, research and interviews with technologists, entrepreneur, photographers, artists, sociologists, anthropologists, researchers and futurists to understand the change that has come with cameras everywhere and what it means to us as people. If you have ideas, suggestions and names of people I should converse with — drop me a line.

March 3rd, 2017, San Francisco.