Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain | Hacker News Reader

Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

designfax.net

71 pointschmoore88931 comments

Now we can have a billion cameras everywhere that are virtually invisible. Bravo! At some point privacy invasive technologies will be so available and advanced that clothing and walls will no longer have any point other than to keep out the wind. Luckily advanced deep learning technology will be there to save us by making fact indistinguishable from fiction.

Yes. It will happen. I bet low energy radio systems (like helios) will connect them up but that won't be for a long time or in my lifetime.

There's a fantastic sci fi book called "Metaplanetary" by Tony Daniel where he invented this and many other fantastic ideas. Imagine that there are billions of little computational nodes around you in the dust ("the grist"). Imagine sentient computer programs, who have human rights. Imagine what people would do who don't believe they are really sentient - yes, they'd torture or kill them. He has some sequels but last time I looked he hadn't published the conclusion book in a long time. He worked in IT in some area. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116171.Metaplanetary. I'll agree with the reviews there that the book starts up a little hard to follow, but then it races away.

Metaplanetary was published in 2001? "Computational dust motes" features in "A Deepness in the sky" by Vernor Vinge which was published in 1999 so Tony Daniel didn't invent the concept. I wouldn't be surprised if the concept is even older tbh.

Good insight, thanks for reminding me of that also great book by Vernor Vinge! Anyway, Metaplanetary is one of my favorites.

It's inevitable that at some point in the future the only way to achieve true privacy will be to be completely and totally uninteresting.

An interesting idea for a sci fi novel.

This has 2 limitations; if everybody becomes less interesting at once, we will merely redefine what "not interesting means" bringing us back to square one. If one individual sets out to become the most uninteresting person ever, a beautiful paradox opens up. By doing so, he immediately becomes an object of interest. I can imagine some douglas adam-esque twist where he unwittingly gains the power to control the weather or something.

Join the advertising segment of completely and totally uninteresting people. The societal equivalent of the Bose-Einstein condensate.

But they still have your IP address which they can use as a signal!

Pay a fee monthly if you want not to be traced seems much more probable. Not much unlike today when celebrities need to pay a company to buy houses for they, hiding the name of the buyer.

David Brin had some interesting thoughts about this inevitability back in 1996: https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/transparentsociety1.htm...

(book was 1998 but portions were published earlier)

Reminds me of another Scifi book called "Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw in which the story uses the idea of "slow glass": glass through which light takes years to pass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_of_Other_Days

Just turn off the lights.

And wifi

Wouldn't a device with night vision deal with that?

The image is of a lens, not a complete camera system. I imagine the system is still a fair bit larger. Moreover, the image you're seeing here has also been deconvolved: it is not the "real" image from the camera.

I'm also suspecting the range on it is fairly limited under normal conditions.

They keep saying "cameras" in the PR article, which is sad, as usual. The research indeed seems to be around only the lens.

The introduction [1] suggests that lenses have been lagging sensors in miniaturization.

> While sensors with submicron pixels do exist, further miniaturization has been prohibited by the fundamental limitations of conventional optics.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26443-0

”The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29, 2021, in Nature Communications.”

Sounds like the university PR-department was smoking something.

Comparing volumes is a cheap trick to inflate the values. A cube that is 500 000 times as large by volume is only 80 times as large by side length.

It seems more correct to me to say the Statue of Liberty is many thousands times bigger than a person than to say it is 50 times bigger than a person

It's the other way around for me, I'd interpret "bigger" as "taller"

> It seems more correct to me to say the Statue of Liberty is many thousands times bigger

If by many thousand times bigger, you mean 15 000 times bigger.

I have to admit that it is hard to say if that fits my intuition. But it is also kind of the point: it's much easier to compare heights than volumes.

edit: remove flawed reasoning while I still can :)

> Well, this is probably not the best example because human bodies are much taller than wider, so their volume wouldn't grow as fast as with a cube if you wanted to scale them.

It doesn't matter what the ratio in dimensions are, if you scale up while preserving them, volume goes up as the cube of linear measure.

Right, edited.

This gives me _A Deepness in the Sky_ vibes: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255

I ready something about a tiny wifi chip recently too .. I'm really amazed we're getting close to that level of technology so quickly!

princeton.edu post[1] on the subject was also discussed[2] recently.

[1] https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2021/11/29/researcher...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29399828

Misleading headline; the graphic in the article makes it quite clear the device is much larger than the "salt grain" that most of us would imagine. And the text of the article mentions a "coarse grain of salt" in a rather slippery attempt to gloss over this.

Still very impressive technology, but, a very misleading headline.

Could this be considered a higher “resolution” fresnel lens?

Kosher or table?

Pink Himalayan salt lamp

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