physorg.com — Using some new mathematics and a silicon chip covered with hundreds of thousands of mirrors the size of a single bacterium, engineers at Rice University have come up with a camera that captures just one point of light several thousand times in rapid succession.
Oct 2, 2006 View in Crawl 4
abadinalbanyOct 2, 2006
the technological breakthrough the porn industry has been dying for!
wanonOct 3, 2006
In fact with only 1 pixel, I would say it's quite low resolution.../has not read tfa
livewireOct 3, 2006
I'm kinda thinking outside the box here, but this technology could mean that we don't have to cram so many pixels onto a tiny sensor, giving it much higher dynamic range since it won't be as sensitive. This could also mean that for the same size sensor, we could put less pixels but end up with the same resolution, giving us greater depth of field, eventually leading to compact point-shoot cameras that rival DSLRs. Basicall, we could one day have the quality, dynamic range, and depth of field of a camera this size:<a class="user" href="http://images.digitalkamera.de/Test/MN-NikonD70-Front-rechts-Blitz-ML.jpg">http://images.digitalkamera.de/Test/MN-NikonD70-Front-rechts-Blitz-ML.jpg</a>in the body of a camera this size:<a class="user" href="http://www.nestor.minsk.by/kg/news/2006/07/2606.jpg">http://www.nestor.minsk.by/kg/news/2006/07/2606.jpg</a>DUGG
wesballOct 3, 2006
You know computers were once these incredibly slow, archaic machines that took up entire rooms. At the time, no one had any idea what impact they would have on the world. I wouldn't be so quick to scoff this.Imagine a world covered in millions of these microscopic cameras, all networked together, creating a virtual environment of almost limitless detail...
notsobrightOct 3, 2006
This is where one decides which will be easier to produce, be less prone to noise, and will scale better. A physical nano-mirror, or the size of say transistors?
ouroborosOct 5, 2006
I wonder if there is any relationship between this and the Red Mysterium sensor.
snorbOct 12, 2006
I'm familiar with the math referenced in the article, and the terminology used is a little misleading. If by pixel, you mean a small square area of the image, then camera is not measuring a single pixel at a time, which would just be stupid. What it is doing, is measuring the sum of the values of a random subset of pixels. Another way to think about it is you're taking the inner product of the image with a random vector of 0's and 1's. I guess you can call this measurement a pixel, but I think it's kind of unintuitive. But I guess the phrase "single-pixel camera" gets the message across of how revolutionary this is, more than "random-subset-measurement camera".