Cameras are about to get a lot smaller

https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21724796-future-photography-flat-cameras-are-about-get-lot-smaller

by spuz • 9 years ago

193 79 9 years ago

economist.com

wallflower2• 9 years ago

He was holding a small device in his hand, the size and shape of a lollipop.

"This is a video camera, and this is the precise model that's getting this incredible image quality. Image quality that holds up to this kind of magnification. So that's the first great thing. We can now get high-def-quality resolution in a camera the size of a thumb."

...

"But for now, let's go back to the places in the world where we most need transparency and so rarely have it. Here's a medley of locations around the world where we've placed cameras. Now imagine the impact these cameras would have had in the past, and will have in the future, if similar events transpire. Here's fifty cameras in Tiananmen Square."

...

"There needs to be accountability. Tyrants can no longer hide. There needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness."

...

ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN

-From "The Circle" by David Eggers

spuz2• 9 years ago

Yes it's a pretty scary future to imagine. I had just watched The Circle before posting this article and it occurred to me that story might be closer to reality than we realise.

fsloth3• 9 years ago

We will probably end up in a world where anyone can be surveyed constantly. Minority Report probably was not far off. Once enough patterns of behaviour start to tricle into government databases eventually they will get enough data to identify patterns identifying various pathological people before they hurt themselves or others. Then the question is: what to do with the data.

mirimir7• 9 years ago

What good is video evidence, if it can be faked? Having numerous independent feeds helps, I suppose. But once you have enough perspectives to create a decent 3D model, you can generate as many fake perspectives as you like.

Also, there are obvious downsides to panopticons.

But none of that matters, I guess. We will have the cameras and the fakes.

kwhitefoot• 9 years ago

See also The Light of Other Days by Baxter and Clarke, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days.

gaius• 9 years ago

What good is video evidence, if it can be faked?

It's easy to "fake" news, and has been since cameras were invented - just choose the way you frame the image, or the moment you press record. No-one will doubt the video evidence of police beating protestors, and no-one will believe the claims that just a few minutes earlier they were throwing petrol bombs, after all where's the video?

fsloth3• 9 years ago

Of the fakes: Some NGO:s are vetting film material to tag specific ones as credible evidence of e.g. states behaving badly. They compare time of day to known weather patterns, cross reference previous film to see if something has been reused etc.

leke2• 9 years ago

If everyone has their camera rolling, it's impartial witness testimony, including the feed of the defendant.

coldtea4• 9 years ago

What good is video evidence, if it can be faked?

Even better: what good is video evidence if few care?

Consider officers shooting black people. There are several videos of that, but does it show any sign of stopping? They even walk off without any repercussions at trial...

And, conversely, when people do care, no extra evidence is needed.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

Ultimately it's the justice system that matters. You can have as many videos you want, if the legal forces dismiss them for "reasons" you can go moot back in your room. This just happened with cop shooting people.

Dylan16807• 9 years ago

Basically irrelevant to a technology for making cameras thinner by a factor of millimeters.

markdown• 9 years ago

"Tyrants can no longer hide."

Seems he missed the other side of the coin. We won't be able to hide from tyrants.

wallflower2• 9 years ago

In this particular book, that angle is more of a minor plot thread. Those politicians who don't buy into using the necklace 'body cam' version of this tiny camera to become transparent (to become 'clear') to their 'constituents' begin to become ostracized or, worse, blackmailed and then jailed (e.g. ostracized). The plot does revolve around people judging the central character's every action in real-time through these tiny cameras.

'1984' is more along the lines of not being able to hide with the 'TV' that watches you while you watch it.

mantas2• 9 years ago

Or you missed who is the tyrant. Anyone who tries to hide is a tyrant.

bwang29• 9 years ago

It seems like economist uses Javascript to create the "You've reached your article limit" dialogue. Simple press ESC key to stop JS from executing on Chrome so that you can read the article.

Also here is my TL:DR summary of it if you're still trying to fight through the pay wall:

There is a thing called grating coupler that works like little high frequency antennas that receives light signals. When you put a whole array of them you will be able to do various scans of light signals to simulate the camera pointing at different direction, or fisheye, telephoto effects without the need of tilting or moving the surface of the array. The underlying computation relies on the ability to calculate and control the timing of signal travelled from each antennas, plus some classic signal interference and phasing issues. An 1cm x 1cm array will contain 1 million such couplers which would create a similar sized image as an iPhone 7 rear camera, but since there is no lens involved, the camera can be made a lot thinner.

mtgx• 9 years ago

Using the Brave browser with the block scripts option enabled seems to work, too.

foota• 9 years ago

You can just open the link in incognito as well.

simooooo• 9 years ago

Thank you! Brilliant Summary. Sounds like a pretty great invention

kogepathic• 9 years ago

Cameras are about to get a lot smaller

No, scientists have developed a prototype which can take fuzzy photos of barcodes.

They then go on to tell you what would be necessary to have their device equal a present day sensor in a phone, but they haven't made one yet.

In fact, no estimate is given for when this technology might be competitive with CMOS sensors. The article just points to his previous work as proof he can get some of his ideas to market.

Relevant XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/678/

I am excited by advances in camera technology, but this headline is peddling research as a pending disruption to the industry, and I don't see any evidence of that in the article.

regularfry6• 9 years ago

He's saying he can make a commercial sensor in 5 years. Now, that's admittedly not saying it'll be in phones in that time, but when it works it won't just be competitive with CMOS sensors, it'll do things they aren't capable of.

chrismorgan• 9 years ago

Five years? Read the aforelinked XKCD; it seems a pretty accurate representation of reality to me.

orbital-decay• 9 years ago

There are planar Fourier capture arrays, which are also lensless, can be implemented with existing CMOS process and seem to be better by every metric than this. AFAIK they are currently being evaluated for eye tracking sensors which aren't sensitive to resolution (128x128 is enough) but need to be flat.

There are also single-pixel compressed sensing cameras, which can be made lensless as well and are limited by the optical modulator specs.

The problem with lensless sensors is always the computing power required to reconstruct the final image.

anta40• 9 years ago

When will this ready to replace my 35mm, full frame camera?

regularfry6• 9 years ago

He's talking about an optical phased array system. Once it's working, competing with a 35mm system "should" (famous last words) be a matter of scaling up the number of elements to match the lens size. The thing is, once that happens, it's got a huge advantage: it doesn't need any other lenses. At all. Any "lens" you could want is a software configuration away.

leemailll• 9 years ago

is there already a model on sale? Like lytro?

dingo_bat• 9 years ago

But is that true? What if I want a 50x zoom lens? How would software do what an entire assembly of precision lenses does?

roryisok• 9 years ago

On mobile, for me at least, the text content of this article disappears when the page has fully loaded. Anyone else? This isn't the first time I've seen this sort of thing happen

stevenh• 9 years ago

economist.com brilliantly bans you from accessing their site after you've clicked a few of their links. The text vanishes because they've sloppily hacked this limitation in client-side by checking a cookie after the page finishes loading. This leaves 99% of visitors thinking that the site is broken, so they leave without ever noticing the message about how they need to pay a ransom to unban themselves.

For sites like this, you can sometimes archive the URL to evade the ban.

http://archive.is/Ni7Lo

wj• 9 years ago

OT: I think it is a bit of a jump to equate subscribing to paying a ransom.

taw55• 9 years ago

I don't think I fully grasped the explanation, it's like some sort of slit-scan pinhole camera? Aren't those images going to be super noisy compared to lensed cameras with larger sensors?

ninjakeyboard• 9 years ago

Cached text-only copy http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NzxuClC...

leke2• 9 years ago

Some ingredients for a always recording society...

- Super cheap and gigantic capacity storage.

- Wireless network like 5G.

- Wireless charging.

- Nano cameras.

I think there was a Black Mirror episode about this.

stefanpie• 9 years ago

Well there was white bear which was more of a philosophical debate and then there was Most Hated in the Nation which I think really hits home the development of small new technologies such as cameras and the consequences of keeping their power and security unchecked.

aleeds• 9 years ago

He is talking about 'The Entire History of You'

swashbuck1r• 9 years ago

There was also The Entire History of You - where everything you see is recorded and can be played back at any time - leading us to hyper-focus on details from the past rather than experiencing the present.

21• 9 years ago

I believe that in some decades will have something like Google Street View, but in realtime, at least for major cities.

mamon• 9 years ago

Many cities already have industrial cameras installed on the streets and inside public transport (buses, trams, subway), as a way to prevent crime.

Until recently the issue was that no one had technical and financial resources to analyze the data, except on court warrant, but once Big Data and computer vision technologies become cheap enough someone will definitely use that as real time surveillance tool.

mproud• 9 years ago

Escape the article limit garbage by using Private Browsing and the like.

Hydraulix989• 9 years ago

RIP Privacy

amelius• 9 years ago

Could this enable a light-field camera? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

This is very much on the path I've seen in software defined radio (SDR). I am particularly interested to see when they invert atmospheric interference in real time. A telescope or spotting scope with a co-linear laser visible to the circuit should be sufficient. Then no shimmering heatwaves in the distance, just a clear picture.

astrostl• 9 years ago

Sensor SIZE is still the primary determination of quality. Not seeing how this changed that.

Cameras are about to get a lot smaller

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