The All Seeing Eye

Yours truly loves to take pictures and do videos as loyal readers know. Having said this, the notion of a lensless camera fascinates this writer to no end, where this tech can go also has no end according to an interesting Physorg piece titled Ultra tiny camera has no lens - uses algorithm to develop pictures.

An extremely tiny lensless camera, developed by Rambus, has been slowly making waves over the past year. Researchers for the company, David Stork and Patrick Gill won a Best Paper award at last year's Sencomm 2013 for describing what the company has created. They spoke again at last month's Mobile World Congress, describing their new type of camera—one that might someday soon be used to give virtually any digital device, some degree of vision.

The camera is both simple and complex, it's really just a very tiny chip (CMOS imager) embedded in a piece of glass. Instead of a lens, a pattern is etched into the glass above the chip—the imager reads the light that is received, processes it using an algorithm developed by Rambus and converts it into a recognizable image. What's amazing is that the etched pattern on the glass and the chip are both roughly the size of a period at the end of a sentence.

Times, they keep a'changin. - Bob Dylan