3 ms·
Researchers have developed pixels that can emit and analyse light together
- tspng 3mo agoResearchers at ETH Zurich have developed a new type of pixel that can not only be used to create images, but also to analyse them. This could eventually be used for better in-display cameras where the pixels are used as a image sensors. The researchers have published their results in Nature recently: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10681-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10681-7
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- close04 3mo agoLove the technological aspect, hate the practical implications. Any part of any screen can be a camera. Good luck covering that with a post-it.
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoI wonder if there is any way to counter that. I can only imagine placing another matching camscreen face to face onto the source one and sending what it sees to a trusted camera-incapable display. But then there is a lot more practical questions and implications..
- rzzzt 3mo agoPolarizing filter? One-way mirror?
- close04 3mo agoWould we even know if a screen is “camera-incapable”? One day the “think of the children” routine will come for your screen.
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoThat's exactly one of the practical implications I mentioned!
- nilamo 3mo agoIf only that group would consider that its the children being watched, maybe they would think of the children then...
- aeve890 3mo ago>I wonder if there is any way to counter that. Not buying invasive shit?
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoSure, unless everything is invasive shit at some point. Won't happen? Think smartphones. Even if you don't have one, everyone around does, with all the consequences.
- mrguyorama 3mo agoAnd that's been working, right?
- emsign 3mo agoA privacy nightmare, this WILL be misused systematically. I used to get excited about new technologies like that, but big tech ruined the future for me.
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoBeautiful! No prole will evade the stare of the Big Brother. P.S. For the offended at "prole" and /s-agnostic parsers: yes that's who you are for the BB, like it or not. And of course there's nothing beautiful in that.
- layla5alive 3mo agoI agree with the others: this is literally the perfect implementation of literal Big Brother "your TV watches you" tech - this WILL BE ABUSED by Tech Corps + Governments. We need to stop building surveilance panopticons! "it is even conceivable that Norris’s pixels could react to a captured image and, without going through a computer, produce corresponding light patterns." Great, also they invented a digital mirror (and digital fun house mirror).
- poly2it 3mo agoIs this really as detrimental to privacy as other comments claim? There are already very small cameras which can be used for adversarial purposes. This technology could be useful for many utilitarian purposes.
- WCSTombs 3mo agoA small camera can easily be covered up. You can't cover something that's embedded into the screen itself.
- poly2it 3mo agoCan you be more precise about what scenario you are envisioning?
- card_zero 3mo agoBut first, could you name two of the many utilitarian purposes?
- poly2it 3mo agoPhone screens without notches, laptops which can have larger cameras for better video calls, VR gear with better eye tracking, digital mirrors and more. I'm sure there are less obvious applications.
- WCSTombs 3mo agoI think Cider9986's comment [1] on the OP covers it pretty well. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48700061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48700061
- poly2it 3mo agoI don't understand why a photosensing pixel is meaningfully worse for privacy than the devices we already have. I mean, sure, you might not as easily be able to cover up your camera with tape, but even then a better solution which should be implemented anyway is a physical decoupling. And as I stated above, I doubt this is meaningful for spying capabilities. Micro cameras are likely more suitable, for better or worse.
- Cider9986 3mo ago>In the future, this could lead to the development of devices that function as camera and display at the same time. So literally a telescreen from 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen Anyone that says they don't value privacy and they have nothing to hide is never willing to install a livestreaming camera in their bedroom and bathroom. The telescreen doesn't really add anything to what we have today, with camera and screen separated. Perhaps it will what finally removes the last place of privacy for regular people, their home. It's already happened with smart tvs and voice assistants but supposedly they don't record all the time. Most phones seem to have working permissions, not to say that people won't allow microphone access, but it isn't the default. Pretty sure that there's no option for microphone all the time, unlike location. I definitely could see a "scandal" when smart TV manufacturers start adding these to analyze peoples reactions to advertising. Could you put it past them considering they already record your screen by default? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition
- AlienRobot 3mo agoIt's really absurd that we've boiled the frog until "ads in smart TVs UIs are normal" and now the goalpost was moved to "recording the consumer to show more ads"
- Ferret7446 3mo agoThe frog boiled itself. Consumers decided they want lower prices rather than privacy. This is old news. The vast majority prefer free with ads over paid.
- ImPostingOnHN 3mo ago> Anyone that says they don't value privacy and they have nothing to hide is never willing to install a livestreaming camera in their bedroom and bathroom. This company is testing that theory by giving a TV away for free, with built-in second screen for ads, and a camera: https://www.telly.com/ https://www.telly.com/
- _mocha 3mo agoThis reminds me of approximately 30 years ago. While dabbling in ham radio, I learned that speakers can work in reverse as microphones, and vice versa.
- thenthenthen 3mo agoI mean, LED’s can also work aa light-sensors!
- unnouinceput 3mo agoAnd transistors as light sensors if you decap and expose the semiconductor junction to light
- atoav 3mo agoThey can, but I have never seen them wired that way in a commercial product. LEDs can also be used to measure light btw.
- snailmailman 3mo agoI definitely had some cheap PC speakers in the mid 2000s that worked as a shitty microphone if you plugged the cable into the microphone port instead of the speaker port. You basically had to yell into them, and the sound quality was atrocious, but it did ‘work’. A surprising amount of circuits work like this. Generators and motors are basically the same as well, and spinning a fan by hand will induce current into the wire. I assume most circuits are designed to properly handle that happening, but I still worry when blowing the dust out of my PC and will manually prevent the fans from spinning when I blow compressed air at them.
- atoav 3mo agoOkay that must have been speakers that were driven directly by the line signal? Otherwise you'd expect an amplifier inbetween the line input and the speakers. This intuition isn't true anymore since today many speakers will have "smart" in them and MEMS microphone ICs are a thing.
- gblargg 3mo agohttps://archive.is/fca8n https://archive.is/fca8n
- Vaslo 3mo agoGlad I’m not the only one who sees the potential issues with these things
- OutOfHere 3mo agoHave a little fun by putting a mirror in front of it when it's not in active use. Let them learn themselves.
- ThoAppelsin 3mo agoRelated video: https://youtu.be/9J-b33tDjL0 https://youtu.be/9J-b33tDjL0
- hgoel 3mo agoAs usual HN is being incredibly alarmist. Cameras are smaller and cheaper, you can even hide them behind the screen itself to make it harder to cover them up. We literally had selfie cameras in phones using under display cameras. Surveillance doesn't demand the kind of quality people expect of their phone cameras, making the slight degradation tolerable. Stick a couple with large lenses, under the display in the middle and in each quadrant and you'd be seriously harming your viewing experience.