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For several years I worked in spectroscopy. It's REALLY tough to take a sensor out of a controlled lab and into the uncontrolled real world and get clear, unam

For several years I worked in spectroscopy. It's REALLY tough to take a sensor out of a controlled lab and into the uncontrolled real world and get clear, unambiguous results like this video shows. Usually the absorption signal you're trying to measure is tiny compared to changes due to background fluctuations, etc. Things tend to only work well for special types of materials that have very distinct absorption properties. There are massive unknowns here and I would never fund them unless they opened up about what spectroscopic technique they're using.

damian2000 12y ago
It mentions this .. "SCiO is based on the age-old near-IR spectroscopy method." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy
bhouston 12y ago
I wrote this elsewhere in this comment section but it is directly relevant to your sentence. It is probably very similar to how Ubisoft made Just Dance using the Wii controller. The Wii controller was really horrible in terms of what you could read from it (it had no clue what your body position was), but if you stored what measurements you got from people dancing properly you could score people against that. Basically there was enough degrees of freedom to identify decent dancing to a degree and if you hid what was actually going on people though it sort of worked. Although the Wii-based Just Dance is horrible compared to the XBox version that used the Kinetic. The key is to hide the intermediate results and profile a lot of things using the same crap sensor and then do fuzzy matching between the bad results. This works if there is enough discernible degrees of freedom.
Odysseas1970 12y ago
Hello. I am interested to read more about the potential sources of variation in measurement with an NIR Spectrometer. Specifically the effect of environmental conditions and of nearby system interactions, such as ambient radiation, ambient temperature, temperature of instrument or workpiece, contamination on the surface of the workpiece, complexity of workpiece composition, etc. Could you help me with some reading suggestions? Thanks! Odysseas

damian2000 12y ago

It mentions this .. "SCiO is based on the age-old near-IR spectroscopy method." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy

bhouston 12y ago

I wrote this elsewhere in this comment section but it is directly relevant to your sentence. It is probably very similar to how Ubisoft made Just Dance using the Wii controller. The Wii controller was really horrible in terms of what you could read from it (it had no clue what your body position was), but if you stored what measurements you got from people dancing properly you could score people against that. Basically there was enough degrees of freedom to identify decent dancing to a degree and if you hid what was actually going on people though it sort of worked. Although the Wii-based Just Dance is horrible compared to the XBox version that used the Kinetic. The key is to hide the intermediate results and profile a lot of things using the same crap sensor and then do fuzzy matching between the bad results. This works if there is enough discernible degrees of freedom.

Odysseas1970 12y ago

Hello. I am interested to read more about the potential sources of variation in measurement with an NIR Spectrometer. Specifically the effect of environmental conditions and of nearby system interactions, such as ambient radiation, ambient temperature, temperature of instrument or workpiece, contamination on the surface of the workpiece, complexity of workpiece composition, etc. Could you help me with some reading suggestions? Thanks! Odysseas