CES: Casio's new Dynamic Photo adds blue-screen to home videos

Back in the 1920s, before sound and Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney produced a cartoon that combined real action with cartoons. The Alice series featured a real little girl who wandered around a cartoon Wonderland -- for its time, it was a revolutionary use of visual technology. Now, Casio is making it possible for families to do the same using their home cameras.

Called the Dynamic Photo function, the feature basically allows people to "blue-screen" a moving object by taking a video of the object and then photographing the background without the object. You can then then place the moving object against a different background. At today's CES press conference, Casio President and CEO Kazuo Kashio offered several demonstrations of how a person could be dropped into a drawing or another photo -- including a little girl who seemed to greet one of the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon.

Blue-screen special effects have become a staple of movie making, and now could become a staple of home photography. For those of us who have researched the history of motion pictures, the ability for anyone to quickly and easily create a composite moving image is something of a wonder.

Information on which cameras will include the Dynamic Photo function was not immediately available.