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Comment by mwigdahl | Hacker News Reader

Chalk another one up for Vernor Vinge. This tech seems like it could directly enable the “ubiquitous surveillance” from _A Deepness in the Sky_. Definitely something to watch closely.

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Also the scatterable surveillance cameras used in his other great novel, 'The Peace War' [0]. Although IIRC they were the size of seeds or similar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peace_War

3 or 4 mm in diameter, according to a scene in chapter 6, big enough to have similar resolution to that of a human eye, according to Paul, but able to look in any direction without physically rotating.

In chapter 13 the enemy describes them as using Fourier optics, though that seemed to be their speculation - not sure whether it was right.

I've been interested in smart dust for a while; recently the news seems to have dried up, and while that may have been other stuff taking up all the attention (and investment money), I suspect that many R&D teams went under government NDAs because they are now good enough to be interesting.

I wonder if someone tried to build a localizer how small they could actually be made?

PS It's "Vernor"

The other side to the localizers is the communication / mesh networking, and the extremely effective security partitioning. Even Anne couldn't crack them! It's certainly a lot to package in such a small form

Thanks, I typed that on my phone and it "fixed" it for me without me noticing.

I haven't read deepness in the sky but it's interesting how wrong alot of scifi got this. Cameras are always considerably bigger than grains of sand

Well, Deepness is set a few thousand years in the future, so we've got some time to work on it.

Or Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular, where the “orphidnet” utility fog enables universal perception/visualization.

"Light of Other Days"/"Other Days, Other Eyes" by Bob Shaw is much closer - and poignant - take on that idea.

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