8 ms·
Cameras are about to get a lot smaller
- roryisok 9y agoOn 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 9y agoeconomist.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 http://archive.is/Ni7Lo
- wj 9y agoOT: I think it is a bit of a jump to equate subscribing to paying a ransom.
- 2OEH8eoCRo 9y agoI hate how supermarkets hold food ransom. Greedy
- laser 9y agoIt's a bit like a ransom when they load the article at first, you start reading, and then the text disappears asking for payment. Fortunately, The Economist seems to just use cookies so you can still view the articles incognito.
- taw55 9y agoI 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 9y agoCached text-only copy http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NzxuClCIlfEJ:https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21724796-future-photography-flat-cameras-are-about-get-lot-smaller&num=1&hl=en&gl=ca&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NzxuClC...
- leke 9y agoSome 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 9y agoWell 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 9y agoHe is talking about 'The Entire History of You'
- swashbuck1r 9y agoThere 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 9y agoI believe that in some decades will have something like Google Street View, but in realtime, at least for major cities.
- mamon 9y agoMany 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.
- mnglkhn2 9y agoIf this is what passes for substantive and documented talk on HN, then things are getting a turn for the worse. There was a post a few days back about France promising something great for 2040. Is hn at an impasse point, where no more technical issues are up for discussion? EDIT: Just to add that if you are more likely to be shot by cops if you are a white criminal than if you are a black one. And this is backed up by stats. To show up on HN and make statements without backing them up looks petty and propagandistic. It reminds me of communist dictatorships: only there the "great leader" would simply state that things are going great (despite obvious starvation) and everybody else would simply clap and nod. To do otherwise would mean death. The Khmer Rouge had a clear policy of rounding up people with glasses and kill them. That was what passed for an intelectual. And millions just vanished. The nazi left would stone and cut just for wearing a hat. So, we are getting close to the Khmer Rouge. That's what you guys are advocating: socialist utopia.
- coldtea 9y ago>If this is what passes for substantive and documented talk on HN, then things are getting a turn for the worse. You mean contentless comments that don't engage with the thread they respond to but instead lament some lost golden age? >Is hn at an impasse point, where no more technical issues are up for discussion? HN always had a mix of technical and non-technical threads (the major one being business issues, which are of course non technical -- it's a VC firm's creation after all). And that's because, despite what the name might suggest, HN is not about people with one-track minds.
- mnglkhn2 9y agoMore like your politically motivated comment on the epidemic of cops wonton killing of black folks. Not only false but also out of context. It was a comment just for the sake of trolling, bit adding anything or substance. This is a good enough reason to want the HN that the brand was built on.
- sctb 9y agoThis comment has a strong blend of meta and ideological flamebait, which nearly always poisons the discussion. Please resist the temptation to do this, no matter what you're replying to. We've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14729686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14729686.
- mproud 9y agoEscape the article limit garbage by using Private Browsing and the like.
- Hydraulix989 9y agoRIP Privacy
- amelius 9y agoCould this enable a light-field camera? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera
- ChuckMcM 9y agoThis 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 9y agoSensor SIZE is still the primary determination of quality. Not seeing how this changed that.
- honestoHeminway 9y agoDavid Brin called it in Earth
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wallflower 9y 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
- spuz 9y agoYes 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.
- fsloth 9y agoWe 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 9y agoWhat 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.
- bwang29 9y agoIt 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.
- kogepathic 9y 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/ 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.
- regularfry 9y agoHe'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 9y agoFive years? Read the aforelinked XKCD; it seems a pretty accurate representation of reality to me.
- orbital-decay 9y agoThere 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.
- regularfry 9y agoAdmittedly I'm reading between the lines here, but I suspect that these don't need computationally expensive reconstruction. The reconstruction is done entirely by setting up the delays correctly on the input sensors, then the image is formed by simple interference. You'd read the image off just like an ordinary ccd.
- anta40 9y agoWhen will this ready to replace my 35mm, full frame camera? :D
- regularfry 9y agoHe'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.
- dingo_bat 9y agoBut is that true? What if I want a 50x zoom lens? How would software do what an entire assembly of precision lenses does?
- regularfry 9y agoIt's not so much that software does what the lenses do, it's that software would configure the hardware to perform the same transfer function on the incoming photons. It's more a reconfiguration of the input than a processing of the output. On edit: I should also point out that you don't get to escape fundamental optical limits with this stuff. You're still diffraction limited, so "lens" size still matters.
- leemailll 9y agois there already a model on sale? Like lytro?
- regularfry 9y agoLytro doesn't quite work the same way. It doesn't capture the phase of the light, so it's a bit more limited.
- spuz 9y agoNo, the technology demonstrated is only capable of imaging 8x8 pixels. Here's a link to the actual research: http://www.caltech.edu/news/ultra-thin-camera-creates-images-without-lenses-78731 http://www.caltech.edu/news/ultra-thin-camera-creates-images...