3 ms·

Not sure about 3-5 years but within the next 10 years we'll likely have 3D sensors that can see 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at megapi

by rsp1984 7y ago

Not sure about 3-5 years but within the next 10 years we'll likely have 3D sensors that can see 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at megapixel resolutions with 30+ fps. At the price and form factor of an entry-level DSLR. In 15 to 20 years every smartphone (or perhaps pair of AR glasses) will have one of these.

georgespencer 7y ago
> In 15 to 20 years every smartphone [...] will have [3D sensors that can see 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at megapixel resolutions with 30+ fps]. I'm a total layperson with cameras and had an abiding sense that there is a fairly hard limitation on what's possible within a smartphone-type housing (because the sensor is limited by the amount of light). I'd love to hear more about how this perceived physical barrier is being overcome!
- mncharity 7y ago
  Not my field, but my impression is optical system design is a very rich high-dimensional space. And thus that suggestions of hard limitation are often overlooking possibilities. For example, resolutions in angle, time, color, and intensity can be traded, inhomogeneously, and augmented with computation. It's not that simple hard limits, say Rayleigh's diffraction limit on resolution, are wrong exactly. But they do seem to get naively misapplied as system limitations. Super-resolution microscopy techniques, for example, work around it.
  - georgespencer 7y ago
    Interesting, thank you!
- ivalm 7y ago
  there are limits on static resolving power but you can improve with tricks such as motion (e.g. saccades in human eyes)
- Someone 7y ago
  ”because the sensor is limited by the amount of light” The entire backside of your smartphone could be a sensor (think millions of pinhole cameras). That would give you plenty of light. Correcting for your fingers covering half the lens shouldn’t be too hard, once you can build that. Keeping the thing smartphone sized, and not turning it into a heater could be challenging. Software-only, one could grab 50 frames in half a second, and do magic to integrate the results into a photo (motion estimation could, if done near-perfectly for every pixel, tell you what pixel values to average for every pixel) Modern smartphones don’t take photos; they use image sequences to produce images that look like photos.

georgespencer 7y ago

> In 15 to 20 years every smartphone [...] will have [3D sensors that can see 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at megapixel resolutions with 30+ fps]. I'm a total layperson with cameras and had an abiding sense that there is a fairly hard limitation on what's possible within a smartphone-type housing (because the sensor is limited by the amount of light). I'd love to hear more about how this perceived physical barrier is being overcome!

mncharity 7y ago
Not my field, but my impression is optical system design is a very rich high-dimensional space. And thus that suggestions of hard limitation are often overlooking possibilities. For example, resolutions in angle, time, color, and intensity can be traded, inhomogeneously, and augmented with computation. It's not that simple hard limits, say Rayleigh's diffraction limit on resolution, are wrong exactly. But they do seem to get naively misapplied as system limitations. Super-resolution microscopy techniques, for example, work around it.
- georgespencer 7y ago
  Interesting, thank you!
ivalm 7y ago
there are limits on static resolving power but you can improve with tricks such as motion (e.g. saccades in human eyes)
Someone 7y ago
”because the sensor is limited by the amount of light” The entire backside of your smartphone could be a sensor (think millions of pinhole cameras). That would give you plenty of light. Correcting for your fingers covering half the lens shouldn’t be too hard, once you can build that. Keeping the thing smartphone sized, and not turning it into a heater could be challenging. Software-only, one could grab 50 frames in half a second, and do magic to integrate the results into a photo (motion estimation could, if done near-perfectly for every pixel, tell you what pixel values to average for every pixel) Modern smartphones don’t take photos; they use image sequences to produce images that look like photos.