Researchers have developed pixels that can emit and analyse light together | Hacker News Reader

Researchers have developed pixels that can emit and analyse light together

ethz.ch

60 pointstspng43 comments

I 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).

Maybe the Board of Peace will outlaw this technology in doubleplusquick time before it can be put to use.

You still need a lens to make a camera

Phased arrays are their own lense.

oh did we already invent a way to make electronics work at 500000GHz?

This 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.

I mean, LED’s can also work aa light-sensors!

And transistors as light sensors if you decap and expose the semiconductor junction to light

They can, but I have never seen them wired that way in a commercial product.

LEDs can also be used to measure light btw.

I 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.

Okay 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.

There's lots of stuff in an electronic assembly that's microphonic, not just speakers. I don't think it's possible to look at an assembly and conclude that it doesn't contain any microphones.

>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

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

It'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"

The 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.

> 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/

The business model of low-cost consumer televisions has already flipped. Many models now sell well below cost with built-in monetization via selling user data, app product placement and streaming app rev share on subs. My Sam's Club has a pallet of this Vizio D-Series 24-inch D24f-J09 "Smart TV" for $88 (https://www.vizio.com/en/tv/d-series/D24f-J09). After retailer margin, IP licenses, packaging and shipping, Vizio is collecting less than $40 for the hardware. Less than a screenless, caseless Raspberry Pi 4.

I bought one to use as a secondary wall-mounted display for my custom home theater in the dedicated attached restroom (no need to pause the movie if someone needs to go to the restroom). It's on a controlled power outlet which turns it on via a motion sensor when anyone enters. So I just needed the TV to power up and display the video signal on the external HDMI input. This turns out to be impossible without heroic intervention because the TV is rife with dark patterns to prevent it being used solely to display external video sources (which earn them no revenue / provide no user data to sell).

To force buyers to put it online, they leverage an interlocking loop of requiring accepting the EULA/privacy policy and forcing an online update of those. You can get it to display external input without agreeing to the EULA or putting it online but this requires aborting the EULA screen with the remote control and navigating their built-in menus. Actually getting a firmware upgrade requires creating a WalMart account(!). Either way, it will not power up and simply display an external source (despite an explicit setting claiming to do so). It works as expected with all their internal app $ources but for external sources it will flash the source for a second then blank the screen (despite all power save, screen blanking being turned off). In all my testing, I discovered the TV also counts how many times it's been turned on. If it's been turned on ~10 times without have an internet connection sufficient to phone home, it will auto-boot to the "Configure Wifi" workflow screens - even if it's never been online. Once past all that, the owner still must interact via multiple IR inputs to get an external source to display. I finally forced it to remain offline and just power on and display an external input (like every 'dumb TV' ever made) by using a home automation IR dongle and emulating the remote button presses under script control.

The only reasons I persisted are A. The home theater was already under sophisticated home automation control for things which actually need control so I only needed to add another wireless IR emitter in the restroom, and B. I needed a small screen of no more than 24 inches, with an advanced enough video decoder chip to handle the range of HD, 4K, 24/25/30 & 60 fps (with drop-frame variants) and HDR10 being fed to the high-end laser projector in the main room from various live TV, streamers, UHD discs and PS5/XBox consoles. Obviously the TV's cheap screen doesn't have 4K pixels or HDR dynamic range but it does convert those signals into its low-end resolution, dynamic range and quality. Having tried half a dozen 20 and 24-inch TVs, this is the only one with an advanced enough decoder chip to do that (another indication how much Vizio values the post-sale monetization).

Note: if you have one of these and find this post via a search, don't bother trying to put it online or upgrading the firmware in the hope it'll behave better. After much experimentation, the only way to get offline external source display (and circumvent the "Wifi Config" screen every ~10 power-ons) is either manual or automated remote button presses. The only good news I have is, if you go to the trouble of 'de-eviling it', it's actually a surprisingly good display for the $88 price if you configure the color profile settings properly (I'm a video engineer).

Researchers 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

Is 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.

A small camera can easily be covered up. You can't cover something that's embedded into the screen itself.

Can you be more precise about what scenario you are envisioning?

But first, could you name two of the many utilitarian purposes?

Phone 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.

I think Cider9986's comment [1] on the OP covers it pretty well.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48700061

I 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.

You cannot cover the entire screen if the entire screen may act as a camera.

You can cover/disable the dedicated camera.

What do you mean by asking about a "scenario"?

Wanting to be sure you aren’t being recorded?

A 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.

Related video: https://youtu.be/9J-b33tDjL0

Have a little fun by putting a mirror in front of it when it's not in active use. Let them learn themselves.

https://archive.is/fca8n

Glad I’m not the only one who sees the potential issues with these things

Love the technological aspect, hate the practical implications. Any part of any screen can be a camera. Good luck covering that with a post-it.

I 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..

Would we even know if a screen is “camera-incapable”? One day the “think of the children” routine will come for your screen.

That's exactly one of the practical implications I mentioned!

If only that group would consider that its the children being watched, maybe they would think of the children then...

>I wonder if there is any way to counter that.

Not buying invasive shit?

Sure, 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.

And that's been working, right?

Polarizing filter? One-way mirror?

Beautiful! 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.

As 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.

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