Guy Built a Compact Camera Using an Optical Mouse

(petapixel.com)

74 points | by PaulHoule 3 days ago ago

14 comments

  • MarkusWandel 3 days ago

    I always say "on a scale from no canoe to a $5K canoe, even the crappiest canoe is 80% of the way there". This camera illustrates that for vision. When you hear about those visual implants that give you, say, 16x16 grayscale you think that's nothing. Yet 30x30 grayscale as seen in this video, especially with live updates and not just a still frame is... vision. Not 80% of the way there, but does punch way above its weight class in terms of usefulness.

    • lillecarl 3 hours ago

      Diminishing returns explained through canoes :)

      16x16 sounds really shit for me who still has perfect vision indeed but I bet it's life changing to be able to identify presence / absence of stuff around you and such! Yay for technology!

      • ACCount37 2 hours ago

        This kind of thing is really held back by BCI tech.

        By now, we have smartphones with camera systems that beat human eyes, and SoCs powerful enough to perform whatever image processing you want them to, in real time.

        But our best neural interfaces have the throughput close to that of a dial-up modem, and questionable longevity. Other technological blockers advanced in leaps and bounds, but SOTA on BCI today is not that far away from 20 years ago. Because medicine is where innovation goes to die.

        It's why I'm excited for the new generation of BCIs like Neuralink. For now, they're mostly replicating the old capabilities, but with better fundamentals. But once the fundamentals - interface longevity, ease of installation, ease of adaptation - are there? We might actually get more capable, more scalable BCIs.

      • metalman an hour ago

        it is a good ilustration of something like moores law, for a comming end point where a hand held device will have more than enough cabability and capacity to do ANYTHING, a meer mortal will EVER require, and the death of options and features, and a return to personal autonomy and responsibility

        AI is the final failure of "intermitent" wipers,which like my latest car, is irevocably enabled to smeer the road grime and imperceptable "rain" into a goo, blocking by ability to see

        • immibis 41 minutes ago

          use the washer button to spray the windshield with water and help the goo wipe off

  • mdtrooper 38 minutes ago

    These kind of news are for me the real news for this website instead of a new fancy tech product of Apple or similar corporation.

    Sincerely a lot of thanks.

  • gsf_emergency_6 2 hours ago

    Compressed sensing! What Terence Tao uses to sell math funding!!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE9AETSoPHw&t=44

    https://www.instructables.com/Single-Pixel-Camera-Using-an-L...

    (Okay not the same guy, but I wanted to share this somewhat related "extreme" camera project)

    • fph 42 minutes ago

      Is this compressed sensing though? The description says "Sensor 30x30 pixels, 64 colors (ADNS-3090 if you wanna look it up)", so definitely not a single-pixel camera.

  • anotherpaul 3 hours ago
  • foxglacier 2 hours ago

    I have to say, the Game Boy camera doesn't have only 4 colors. It has an analog output you can connect to your own ADC with more bits and get more shades of gray. I even managed to get color pictures out of it by swapping color filters and combining the images.