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Over a hundred people gathered around the Web, across the world to create a composite image via camera phone pictures at the Mobile Imaging Summit in Monterey, California this week.

The project, The 5 Minute World, evolved out of author and photographer's Rick Smolan work at capturing a day or week in the life of humanity in photos. The rise of camera phones - with their wireless capabilities - greatly condenses the time period possible for such an endeavor.

Smolan believes camera phone technology is pivotal, a natural evolution of humanities deep need to tell stories through photographs.

"In 2003 digital cameras outsold film cameras. In 2004 cell phone cameras outsold digital cameras. By the end of 2005, a billion ordinary people will be carrying camera-phones with them 24/7. The ability to shoot and then instantly share images is going to dramatically change the way humanity sees itself and how each of us tells our own stories," according to Smolan.

For convenience sake, no doubt, The 5 Minute World restricted humanity to Motorola employees. Pictures were taken of people from different countries holding up the font page of their local newspaper; with the vendor's own camera-enabled handsets, including the V635 and new RAZR V3x, of course.

Next, the images were sent to a specially crafted Web page—to form an instant composite of faces and headlines across the globe—and projected onto a screen for Mobile Imaging Summit attendees.

Simultaneously, digital artist Laurence Gartel—who, along with summit host Future Image's President Alexis Gerard and Smolan came up with The 5 Minute World concept—dowloaded the pictures into a poster template, which was then printed as a 24 x 36-inch art piece.

500 special limited edition copies of the Laurence Gartel poster were produced to commemorate The Five Minute World. The first 400 inscribed by all participants in the project

The Five Minute World glimpsed into a how wireless mobile imaging is altering the world, according to Future Image's Alexis Gerard. He said, "The explosive growth in personal network-connected image capture devices is a fundamental shift, comparable for instance to the rapid spread of PCs in the '90s, but on a much larger scale.”

"Just as ubiquitous PCs converged with other technologies to give birth to the mass-market Internet, ubiquitous camera-phones will converge with emerging technologies like image recognition, virtual displays, and others that were topics at our recent Summit, to change business and society in profound ways. The '5 Minute World' demonstration provided an exciting glimpse of these new possibilities”, Gerard added.

Market research firm InfoTrends reports camera phone shipments will hit 903 million units by the end of the decade; four times what it is today. They will account for 87 percent of all mobile phones shipped at that time.