[HN Gopher] A "meta-optics" camera that is the size of a grain o...
___________________________________________________________________
A "meta-optics" camera that is the size of a grain of salt
Author : rbanffy
Score : 193 points
Date : 2024-11-22 11:39 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cacm.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cacm.acm.org)
| taosx wrote:
| That's a nice innovation that I'm not that happy about, as there
| would be even less privacy...
|
| Maybe on the other side it's good news as ppl are usually their
| best selves when they are being watched.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > ppl are usually their best selves when they are being
| watched.
|
| I don't think that view holds up.
|
| A, it very much depends on who is watching, what their
| incentives are, and what power they hold.
|
| And B, it also depends on who is being watched - not everyone
| thrives under a microscope. Are they the type to feel stifled?
| Or rebellious?
| Scarblac wrote:
| Also, whose definition of "best self" are we using, that of
| the person being watched or of the person controlling the
| camera?
| hypeatei wrote:
| Unless you're in your own home, I think it's basically a
| guarantee at this point that you're being recorded. Could be
| CCTV, trail cameras, some random recording a TikTok, etc...
| ninalanyon wrote:
| That will only hold while being watched is rare. See Clarke and
| Baxter's Light of Other Days for an examination of the
| consequences of ubiquitous surveillance.
| krunck wrote:
| The watchers would be able to blackmail/control anybody who
| engages in private activities that they don't want to be
| public. So who watches the watchers? And who watches them? No.
| Privacy is 100% required in a free society.
| jdalgetty wrote:
| This won't be good for society.
| whynotminot wrote:
| How will it be all that different than the ubiquitous imaging
| we have now?
| hk__2 wrote:
| It will be the same, but worse.
| timdiggerm wrote:
| You can sometimes find a hidden camera today.
| rapnie wrote:
| The rayban metaglasshole comes to mind. Now its just
| journalists who fool people in the street with AI face
| recognition tricks, and its all still fun and games. But this
| is clearly a horror invention, merrily introduced by jolly
| zuck, boss of facelook.
| roflmaostc wrote:
| This is no news?
|
| Has been published in 2021. Also here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29399828
| bhaney wrote:
| > produce full-color images that are equal in quality to those
| produced by conventional cameras
|
| I was really skeptical of this since the article conveniently
| doesn't include any photos taken by the nano-camera, but there
| are examples [1] in the original paper that are pretty
| impressive.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26443-0/figures/2
| andrepd wrote:
| How does this work? If it's just reconstructing the images with
| nn, a la Samsung pasting a picture of the moon when it detected
| a white disc on the image, it's not very impressive.
| nateroling wrote:
| I had the same thought, but it sounds like this operates at a
| much lower level than that kind of thing:
|
| > Then, a physics-based neural network was used to process
| the images captured by the meta-optics camera. Because the
| neural network was trained on metasurface physics, it can
| remove aberrations produced by the camera.
| Intralexical wrote:
| I'd like to see some examples showing how it does when
| taking a picture of completely random fractal noise. That
| should show it's not just trained to reconstruct known
| image patterns.
|
| Generally it's probably wise to be skeptical of anything
| that appears to get around the diffraction limit.
| brookst wrote:
| I believe the claim is that the NN is trained to
| reconstruct pixels, not images. As in so many areas, the
| diffraction limit is probabalistic so combining
| information from multiple overlapping samples and NNs
| trained on known diffracted -> accurate pairs may well
| recover information.
|
| You're right that it might fail on noise with resolution
| fine enough to break assumptions from the NN training
| set. But that's not a super common application for
| cameras, and traditional cameras have their own
| limitations.
|
| Not saying we shouldn't be skeptical, just that there is
| a plausible mechanism here.
| neom wrote:
| we've had very good chromatic aberration correction since
| I got a degree in imaging technology and that was over 20
| years ago so I'd imagine it's not particularly difficult
| for name your flavour of ML.
| Intralexical wrote:
| My concern would be that if it can't produce accurate
| results on a random noise test, then how do we trust that
| it actually produces accurate results (as opposed to
| merely plausible results) on normal images?
|
| Multilevel fractal noise specifically would give an
| indication of how fine you can go.
| brookst wrote:
| "Accurate results" gets you into the "what even is a
| photo" territory. Do today's cameras, with their huge
| technology stack, produce accurate results? With
| sharpening and color correction and all of that, probably
| not.
|
| I agree that measuring against such a test would be
| interesting, but I'm not sure it's possible or desirable
| for any camera tech to produce an objectively "true"
| pixel by pixel value. This new approach may fail/cheat in
| different ways, which is interesting but not
| disqualifying to me.
| Intralexical wrote:
| > Ultrathin meta-optics utilize subwavelength nano-antennas to
| modulate incident light with greater design freedom and space-
| bandwidth product over conventional diffractive optical
| elements (DOEs).
|
| Is this basically a visible-wavelength beamsteering phased
| array?
| itishappy wrote:
| Yup. It's also passive. The nanostructures act like delay
| lines.
| mrec wrote:
| Interesting. This idea appears pretty much exactly at the
| end of Bob Shaw's 1972 SFnal collection _Other Days, Other
| Eyes_. The starting premise is the invention of "slow
| glass" that looks like an irrelevant gimmick but ends up
| revolutionizing all sorts of things, and the final bits
| envisage a disturbing surveillance society with these tiny
| passive cameras spread everywhere.
|
| It's a good read; I don't think the extrapolation of one
| technical advance has ever been done better.
| walterbell wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42217251
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Those images are certainly impressive, but I certainly don't
| agree with the statement "equal in quality to those produced by
| conventional cameras": they're quite obviously lacking in
| sharpness and color.
| neom wrote:
| conventional ultra thin lens cameras are mostly endoscopes,
| so it's up against this: https://www.endoscopy-campus.com/wp-
| content/uploads/Neuroend...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Just curious, what am I looking at here?
| neom wrote:
| my education is on the imaging side not the medical side
| but I believe this: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-
| conditions/neuroendocrin... + this: https://emedicine.med
| scape.com/article/176036-overview?form=... - looks like
| it was shot with this: https://vet-
| trade.eu/enteroscope/218-olympus-enteroscope-sif...
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's one of those Taboola type ads going around with a
| similar image that suggests it is a close up of belly
| fat. Given the source and their propensity for using
| images unrelated to topic, so not sure if that's what it
| really is.
| card_zero wrote:
| I wonder how they took pictures with four different cameras
| from the exact same position at the exact same point in time.
| Maybe the chameleon was staying very still, and maybe the
| flowers were indoors and that's why they didn't move in the
| breeze, and they used a special rock-solid mount that kept
| all three cameras perfectly aligned with microscopic
| precision. Or maybe these aren't genuine demonstrations, just
| mock-ups, and they didn't even really have a chameleon.
| cliffy wrote:
| Camera rigs exist for this exact reason.
| dylan604 wrote:
| what happens when you go too far from trusting what you
| see/read/hear on the internet? simple logic gets tossed
| out like a baby in the bathwater.
|
| now, here's the rig I'd love to see with this: take a
| hundred of them and position them like a bug's eye to see
| what could be done with that. there'd be so much
| overlapping coverage that 3D would be possible, yet the
| parallax would be so small that makes me wonder how much
| depth would be discernible
| gcanyon wrote:
| Given the size of their camera, you could glue it to the
| center of another camera's lens with relatively
| insignificant effect on the larger camera's performance.
| derefr wrote:
| They didn't really have a chameleon. See "Experimental
| setup" in the linked paper [emphasis mine]:
|
| > After fabrication of the meta-optic, we account for
| fabrication error by performing a PSF calibration step.
| This is accomplished by using an optical relay system to
| image a pinhole illuminated by fiber-coupled LEDs. We then
| conduct imaging experiments by replacing the pinhole with
| an OLED monitor. _The OLED monitor is used to display
| images that will be captured by our nano-optic imager._
|
| But shooting a real chameleon is irrelevant to what they're
| trying to demonstrate here.
|
| At the scales they're working at here ("nano-optics"),
| there's no travel distance for chromatic distortion to take
| place within the lens. Therefore, whether they're shooting
| a 3D scene (a chameleon) or a 2D scene (an OLED monitor
| showing a picture of a chameleon), the light that makes it
| through their tiny lens to hit the sensor is going to be
| the same.
|
| (That's the _intuitive_ explanation, at least; the
| technical explanation is a bit stranger, as the lens is
| _sub-wavelength_ - and shaped into structures that act as
| antennae for specific light frequencies. You might say that
| _all_ the lens is doing is chromatic distortion -- but in a
| very controlled manner, "funnelling" each frequency of
| inbound light to a specific part of the sensor, somewhat
| like a MIMO antenna "funnels" each frequency-band of signal
| to a specific ADC+DSP. Which amounts to the same thing:
| this lens doesn't "see" any difference between 3D scenes
| and 2D images of those scenes.)
| queuebert wrote:
| Tiny cameras will always be limited in aperture, so low light
| and depth of field will be a challenge.
| baxtr wrote:
| Also interesting: the paper is from 2021.
| dcreater wrote:
| No link in the article to the actual paper?
| hk__2 wrote:
| It's in the "Further Reading" section at the bottom:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26443-0
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Chalk another one up for Vernor Vinge. This tech seems like it
| could directly enable the "ubiquitous surveillance" from _A
| Deepness in the Sky_. Definitely something to watch closely.
| arethuza wrote:
| I wonder if someone tried to build a localizer how small they
| could actually be made?
|
| PS It's "Vernor"
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Thanks, I typed that on my phone and it "fixed" it for me
| without me noticing.
| cmpb wrote:
| The other side to the localizers is the communication / mesh
| networking, and the extremely effective security
| partitioning. Even Anne couldn't crack them! It's certainly a
| lot to package in such a small form
| ben_w wrote:
| I've been interested in smart dust for a while; recently the
| news seems to have dried up, and while that may have been other
| stuff taking up all the attention (and investment money), I
| suspect that many R&D teams went under government NDAs because
| they are now good enough to be interesting.
| 12907835202 wrote:
| I haven't read deepness in the sky but it's interesting how
| wrong alot of scifi got this. Cameras are always considerably
| bigger than grains of sand
| cmpb wrote:
| Well, Deepness is set a few thousand years in the future, so
| we've got some time to work on it.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Also the scatterable surveillance cameras used in his other
| great novel, 'The Peace War' [0]. Although IIRC they were the
| size of seeds or similar.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peace_War
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| 3 or 4 mm in diameter, according to a scene in chapter 6, big
| enough to have similar resolution to that of a human eye,
| according to Paul, but able to look in any direction without
| physically rotating.
|
| In chapter 13 the enemy describes them as using Fourier
| optics, though that seemed to be their speculation - not sure
| whether it was right.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Or Rudy Rucker's Postsingular, where the "orphidnet" utility
| fog enables universal perception/visualization.
| aredox wrote:
| "Light of Other Days"/"Other Days, Other Eyes" by Bob Shaw is
| much closer - and poignant - take on that idea.
| curiousObject wrote:
| If that's true, maybe it would allow you to put a 10,000 camera
| array (100x100) on a smartphone, and do interesting things with
| computational imaging?
| bhaney wrote:
| Some rough numbers:
|
| The paper says that reconstructing an actual image from the raw
| data produced by the sensor takes ~58ms of computation, so
| doing it for 10,000 sensors would naively take around ten
| minutes, though I'm sure there's room for optimization and
| parallelization.
|
| The sensors produce 720x720px images, so a 100x100 array of
| them would produce 72,000x72,000px images, or ~5 gigapixels.
| That's a lot of pixels for a smartphone to push around and
| process and store.
| fragmede wrote:
| 72,000*72,000* say, 24 bits per color * 3 colors, equals ~43
| GiB per image.
|
| edit: mixed up bits and bytes
| bhaney wrote:
| Careful with your bits vs bytes there
| fragmede wrote:
| edited, thanks!
| jajko wrote:
| Sensor size is super important for resulting quality, that's
| why pros still lug around huge full frame (even if mirrorless)
| cameras and not run around with phones. There are other reasons
| ie speed for sports but lets keep it simple (also speed is
| affected by data amount processed, which goes back to
| resolution).
|
| Plus higher resolution sensors have this nasty habit of
| producing too large files, processing of which slows down given
| devices compared to smaller, crisper photos and they take much
| more space, even more so for videos. That's probably why Apple
| held to 12mpix main camera for so long, there were even 200mpix
| sensors available around if wanted.
| delegate wrote:
| First thought that came to mind - insect-sized killer drones. I
| guess that's the informational context we are in right now.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| You would still have to power the thing and store the data etc.
| This is just about the lense.
| cjameskeller wrote:
| The Air Force was already publicly talking about such things in
| 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_5YkQ9w3PJ4
| pizza234 wrote:
| > as well as implementing unique AI-powered image post-processing
| to create high-quality images from the camera.
|
| They're not comparable, in the intuitive sense, to conventional
| cameras.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Are they not? Every modern camera does the same thing.
| Upscaling, denoising, deblurring, adjusting colors, bumping and
| dropping shadows and highlights, pretty much no aspect of the
| picture is the way the sensor sees it once the rest of the
| pipeline is done. Phone cameras do this to a more extreme
| degree than say pro cameras, but they all do it.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| To point out the obvious, film cameras don't, nor do many
| digital cameras. Unless you mean modern in the sense of
| "cameras you can buy from best buy right now", of course. But
| that isn't very interesting: best buy has terrible taste in
| cameras.
| kristjank wrote:
| Huh, I like your comment. It's such a nice way of pointing
| out someone equating marketability to quality.
| sega_sai wrote:
| There are a lot of steps like that provided you want an
| image that you want to show to the user (i.e. Jpeg). You do
| have somehow merge the 3 Bayer filter detections on
| rectangular grid, which involves interpolation. You do have
| to subtract some sort of bias in a detector, possibly
| correct for different sensitivity across the detector. You
| have to map the raw 'electron counts' into Jpeg scale which
| involves another set of decisions/image processing steps
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| There is clear processing in terms of interpreting the
| raw sensor data as you're describing. Then there are
| blurrier processes still, like "denoising" and
| "upscaling", which straddle the line between bias-
| correction and alteration. Then there's modification of
| actual color and luminance as the parent was describing.
| Now we're seeing full alterations applied automatically
| with neural nets, literally altering shapes and shadows
| and natural lighting phenomena.
|
| I think it's useful to distinguish all of these even if
| they _are_ desired. I really love my iPhone camera, but
| there 's something deeply unsettling about how it alters
| the photos. It's fundamentally producing a different
| image you can get with either film or through your eyes.
| Naturally this is true for all digital sensors but we
| once could point out specifically how and why the
| resulting image differs from what our eyes see. It's no
| longer easy to even enumerate the possible alterations
| that go on via software, let alone control many of them,
| and I think there will be backlash at some point (or
| stated differently, a market for cameras that allow
| controlling this).
|
| I've got to imagine it's frustrating for people who rely
| on their phone cameras for daily work to find out that
| upgrading a phone necessarily means relearning its
| foibles and adjusting how you shoot to accommodate it.
| Granted, I mostly take smartphone photos in situations
| where i'd rather not be neurotic about the result
| (candids, memories, reminders, etc) but surely there are
| professionals out there who can speak to this.
| cubefox wrote:
| "AI-powered image post-processing" is only done in
| smartphones I believe.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Not anymore. DSLR makers are already using AI (in-camera
| neural network processing) for things like upscaling and
| noise removal.
| https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/reviews/canon-
| eos-r1-revi...
|
| _" The Neural network Image Processing features in this
| camera are arguably even more important here than they are
| in the R5 Mark II. A combination of deep learning and
| algorithmic AI is used to power In-Camera Upscaling, which
| transforms the pedestrian-resolution 24.2MP images into
| pixel-packed 96MP photos - immediately outclassing every
| full-frame camera on the market, and effectively hitting
| GFX and Hasselblad territory.
|
| "On top of that is High ISO Noise Reduction, which uses AI
| to denoise images by 2 stops. It works wonders when you're
| pushing those higher ISOs, which are already way cleaner
| than you'd expect thanks to the flagship image sensor and
| modest pixel count."_
| stevenae wrote:
| Pro cameras do not do this to any degree.
|
| Edit: by default.
| vlabakje90 wrote:
| The cameras themselves might not, but in order to get a
| decent picture you will need to apply demosaicing and gamma
| correction in software at the very least, even with high
| end cameras.
| gyomu wrote:
| Right, and the point ppl are making upthread is that
| deterministic signal processing and probabilistic
| reconstruction approaches are apples and oranges.
| oasisaimlessly wrote:
| It's trivial to make most AI implementations
| deterministic; just use a constant RNG seed.
| rippeltippel wrote:
| It's interesting how they mention beneficial impacts on medicine
| and science in general, but everyone knows that the first
| applications will likely be military and surveillance.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| And since it's AI improved, all of th will hurt people because
| of hallucinations.
|
| I don't trust human to avoid taking shorcuts once the tech is
| available, it's too convenient to have "information" for so
| cheap, and less costly to silence the occasional scandal.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > but everyone knows that the first applications will likely be
| military and surveillance.
|
| military, surveillance and porn
| jansan wrote:
| Can we agree that in the field of cameras we surpassed science
| fiction?
|
| I can remember watching a TV series as a child where a time
| traveler went back to the 80s and some person told him that
| everything is about miniaturization. Then he pointed to a little
| pin on the time traveler's jacket, which was actually a camera,
| and said: "This little pin for example could one day hold a full
| video camera", which seemed a bit ridiculous at that time.
| ripe wrote:
| Maybe I'm being too skeptical, and certainly I am only a layman
| in this field, but the amount of ANN-based post-processing it
| takes to produce the final image seems to cast suspicion on the
| meaning of the result.
|
| At what point do you reduce the signal to the equivalent of an
| LLM prompt, with most of the resulting image being explained by
| the training data?
|
| Yeah, I know that modern phone cameras are also heavily post-
| processed, but the hardware is at least producing a reasonable
| optical image to begin with. There's some correspondence between
| input and output; at least they're comparable.
| mahoho wrote:
| I've seen someone on this site comment to the effect that if
| they could use a tool like dall-e to generate a picture of
| "their dog" that looked better than a photo they could take
| themselves, they would happily take it over a photo.
|
| The future is going to become difficult for people who find
| value in creative activities, beyond just a raw
| audio/visual/textual signal at the output. I think most people
| who really care about a creative medium would say there's some
| kind of value in the process and the human intentionality that
| creates works, both for the creator who engages in it and the
| audience who is aware of it.
|
| In my opinion most AI creative tools don't actually benefit
| serious creators, they just provide a competitive edge for
| companies to sell new products and enable more dilettantes to
| enter the scene and flood us with mediocrity
| guerrilla wrote:
| This seems like it's going to ne a serious problem for privacy...
| not that anyone cares.
| nachox999 wrote:
| It is possible to create realistic images and videos with AI,
| making anyone do anything. Whether a photo or video is real or
| not will soon be impossible to distinguish, and it won't matter
| to those who want to cause harm
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Whether a photo or video is real or not will soon be
| impossible to distinguish,
|
| You're forgetting something. Chain of custody, trust and
| reputation. The source of an image or video matters as to
| whether it is considered a reliable representation of reality
| or not.
|
| We will develop better methods of verifying sources as well,
| possibly using cryptography and new social networks where
| members authenticate each other in-person and trust is built
| up.
| xg15 wrote:
| I don't want a camera the size of a grain of salt! At least not
| while surveillance capitalism and creeping authoritariarism are
| in full swing...
| rapnie wrote:
| Just file a complaint with the United Nations Ethics Czar. Oh..
| wait.
| nachox999 wrote:
| For those who want to cause harm (discredit), they don't need a
| real photo; AI is enough
| DCH3416 wrote:
| We've always had this sort of stuff. Back in the 70s you had
| cameras the size of lighters. There's solutions for anyone
| determined enough. Even with authoritarian states, you'll find
| counter measures with sufficient demand. It's reed in the wind
| shit. Hopefully we won't kill ourselves in the process.
| foul wrote:
| How would someone detect sensors so small?
|
| How would someone excrete an array of these cameras if ingested?
| kaimac wrote:
| you could detect the supporting electronics with a nonlinear
| junction detector but they are not cheap
| thfuran wrote:
| If you eat something the size of a grain of salt that isn't
| digestible, excreting it poses no problem.
| ep_jhu wrote:
| Everyone here is thinking about privacy and surveillance and here
| I am wondering if this is what lets us speed up nano cameras to
| relativistic speeds with lasers to image other solar systems up
| close.
| skandinaff wrote:
| we would also need a transmitter of equivalent size to send
| those images back. also an energy source
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Just do round trip!
| sangnoir wrote:
| We'll need even bigger[1] breakthroughs in propulsion if
| it's going to be self-propelling itself back to Sol at
| relativistic speeds.
|
| 1. A "simpler" sci-fi solution foe a 1-way trip that's
| still out of our reach is a large light sail and huge
| Earth-based laser, but his required "smaller" breakthroughs
| in material science
| SoftTalker wrote:
| As well as a way around Newton's Third Law.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I meant to say the "simpler" (but still very complicated)
| solar sail approach was for a _one-way trip_. On paper,
| our civilization can muster the energy required to
| accelerate tiny masses to relativistic speeds. A return
| trip at those speeds would require a nee type of science
| to concentrate that amount of energy in a small mass and
| use it for controlled propulsion.
| DCH3416 wrote:
| Well if you can propel something forward you can propel
| it backwards as well.
|
| I'm assuming some sort of fixed laser type propulsion
| mechanism would leverage a type of solar sail technology.
| Maybe you could send a phased laser signal that
| "vibrates" a solar sail towards the source of energy
| instead of away.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Well if you can propel something forward you can propel
| it backwards as well
|
| Not necessarily - at least with currently known science.
| Light sails work ok transferring momentum from photons,
| allowing positive acceleration from a giant laser Earth.
| Return trip requires a giant laser on the other side.
| NL807 wrote:
| Honestly even if they are size of a jellybean, it would be a
| massive boon for space exploration. Just imagine sending them
| for reconnaissance work around the solar system to check out
| potential bodies to explore for bigger probes later down the
| track. Even to catch interesting objects suddenly appearing
| with minimal delay, like `Oumuamua.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| It's been a while since I've heard anyone talk about the
| Starshot project[0]. Maybe this would help revitalize it.
|
| Also even without aiming for Proxima Centauri, it would be
| great to have more cameras in our own planetary system.
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Gilster writes about it every few months
|
| https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/01/19/data-return-
| from-...
| kaimac wrote:
| Not a single mention of the obvious privacy concerns in the
| article
| api wrote:
| This kind of thing -- that humans can do today with current
| technology -- is why if an ET intelligence that could travel
| interstellar distances wanted to observe us we would never know
| unless they wanted us to know.
|
| Their probes could be the size of sand grains, maybe even dust.
| Maybe not quite sophons, but not much better as far as our odds
| of finding anything. I suppose there would have to be something
| larger to receive signals from these things and send them back
| (because physics), but that could be hanging out somewhere we'd
| be unlikely to see it.
|
| Yet another Fermi paradox answer: we are looking for big
| spacecraft when the universe is full of smart dust.
| cubefox wrote:
| The article was published in 2021. Why do they repost this as
| "news" three years later?
| d--b wrote:
| There is some optics thing that looks cool, but it doesn't say
| how the image is actually recorded.
|
| Then there is the whole "neural" part. Do these get "enhanced" by
| a generative AI that fills the blur based on the most
| statistically likely pixels?
|
| The article is pretty bad.
| DCH3416 wrote:
| From what I can tell it's using a neural network to derive an
| image from the interference patterns of light.
|
| I imagine you could do this using a standard computational
| model, it would just be very intensive. So I guess it would be
| 'enhanced' in the same way a JPEG stores an image in a lossy
| format.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Years ago I saw an interview with a futurist that mentioned the
| following:
|
| "One day, your kids will go to the toy store and get a sheet of
| stickers. Each sticker is actually a camera with an IPv6 address.
| That means they can put a sticker somewhere, go and point a
| browser at that address and see a live camera feed.
|
| I should point out: all of the technology to do this already
| exists, it just hasn't gotten cheap enough to mass market. When
| economies of scale do kick in, society is going to have to deal
| with a dramatic change in what they think 'physical privacy'
| means."
| brokensegue wrote:
| I'm very skeptical this technology already exists. Maybe if you
| vastly change the meaning of "sticker"
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| "PCB-with-onboard-battery-and-adhesive-backing-icker"
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Nah, the only thing I believe will turn out inaccurate here
| is IPv6.
| petra wrote:
| Maybe it's possible but i can't i seem to think of an energy
| harvesting Method that would fit that system without direct
| sunlight.
| NL807 wrote:
| If these devices (one day) can run on the same power as a
| solar powered calculator, it might be possible to place them
| in ambient light conditions.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| And when you scratch the stickers they smell like strawberry.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| (2021) The real story:
| https://light.princeton.edu/publication/neural-nano-optics/
| casey2 wrote:
| Is it possible to make an orbital death laser with this?
| DCH3416 wrote:
| I mean. If you find a way of harnessing enough energy.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| as an optic scientists i would protest my work being lumped
| zogether with the psychedelics of AIchemists
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Grains of rice are pretty big, and the images they demonstrate
| are NOT that impressive. There are cameras you can BUY right now
| whose size is 1x1x2 mm (smaller than a grain if rice) which
| produce images that compare. Here is one example:
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ams-osram-usa-inc...
|
| It is pretty easy to interface with too - i did it with a pi pico
| microcontroller:
| https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1753585604971917313
| eurleif wrote:
| The OP describes them as the size of a grain of _salt_ , not a
| grain of rice.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Wow.
|
| Given the tiny dimensions, and wide field, adding regular lenses
| over an array could create extreme wide field, like 160x160
| degrees, for everyday phone cameras. Or very small 360x180 degree
| stand-alone cameras. AR glasses with a few cameras could operate
| with 360x160 degrees and be extremely situationally aware!
|
| Another application would be small light field cameras. I don't
| know enough to judge if this is directly applicable, or adaptable
| to that. But it would be wonderful to finally have small cheap
| light field cameras. Both for post-focus adjustment and (better
| than stereo) 3D image sensing and scene reconstruction.
| 1024core wrote:
| > The meta-optics camera is the first device of its kind to
| produce full-color images that are equal in quality to those
| produced by conventional cameras, which are an order of magnitude
| larger. In fact, the meta-optics camera is 500,000 times smaller
| than conventional cameras that capture the same level of image
| quality.
|
| That would make them 6 orders of magnitude larger.
| gatkinso wrote:
| All kinds of exciting implications for small cameras and lens
| assemblies in VR/AR
| isogon wrote:
| Becomes a lot less interesting when you consider that there's no
| way to power such a camera for any meaningful period of time
| without a much larger battery (ignoring the issue of
| storage/transmission).
| kouru225 wrote:
| lmao of course the image looks like those monster pov shots from
| a 1980s horror movie
| legohead wrote:
| In The Culture series books, there's a concept of "smart dust".
| Basically dust sized surveillance drones that they cover planets
| with, that lets them see and hear everything that's going on.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| This reminds me of Lytro, a "light field" camera, that could be
| focused digitally after-the-fact to any focal plane using online
| software.
|
| Does anyone know why Lytro couldn't be shrunk to fit in
| smartphones? Because this seems like similar technology.
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