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> produce full-color images that are equal in quality to those produced by conventional cameras

I was really skeptical of this since the article conveniently doesn't include any photos taken by the nano-camera, but there are examples [1] in the original paper that are pretty impressive.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26443-0/figures/2

Years ago I saw an interview with a futurist that mentioned the following:

"One day, your kids will go to the toy store and get a sheet of stickers. Each sticker is actually a camera with an IPv6 address. That means they can put a sticker somewhere, go and point a browser at that address and see a live camera feed.

I should point out: all of the technology to do this already exists, it just hasn't gotten cheap enough to mass market. When economies of scale do kick in, society is going to have to deal with a dramatic change in what they think 'physical privacy' means."

> as well as implementing unique AI-powered image post-processing to create high-quality images from the camera.

They're not comparable, in the intuitive sense, to conventional cameras.

This is no news?

Has been published in 2021. Also here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29399828

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.

If that’s true, maybe it would allow you to put a 10,000 camera array (100x100) on a smartphone, and do interesting things with computational imaging?

Wow.

Given the tiny dimensions, and wide field, adding regular lenses over an array could create extreme wide field, like 160x160 degrees, for everyday phone cameras. Or very small 360x180 degree stand-alone cameras. AR glasses with a few cameras could operate with 360x160 degrees and be extremely situationally aware!

Another application would be small light field cameras. I don't know enough to judge if this is directly applicable, or adaptable to that. But it would be wonderful to finally have small cheap light field cameras. Both for post-focus adjustment and (better than stereo) 3D image sensing and scene reconstruction.

Everyone here is thinking about privacy and surveillance and here I am wondering if this is what lets us speed up nano cameras to relativistic speeds with lasers to image other solar systems up close.

That's a nice innovation that I'm not that happy about, as there would be even less privacy...

Maybe on the other side it's good news as ppl are usually their best selves when they are being watched.

How would someone detect sensors so small?

How would someone excrete an array of these cameras if ingested?

This reminds me of Lytro, a "light field" camera, that could be focused digitally after-the-fact to any focal plane using online software.

Does anyone know why Lytro couldn't be shrunk to fit in smartphones? Because this seems like similar technology.

This won’t be good for society.

First thought that came to mind - insect-sized killer drones. I guess that's the informational context we are in right now.

Becomes a lot less interesting when you consider that there's no way to power such a camera for any meaningful period of time without a much larger battery (ignoring the issue of storage/transmission).

All kinds of exciting implications for small cameras and lens assemblies in VR/AR

Grains of rice are pretty big, and the images they demonstrate are NOT that impressive. There are cameras you can BUY right now whose size is 1x1x2 mm (smaller than a grain if rice) which produce images that compare. Here is one example: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ams-osram-usa-inc...

It is pretty easy to interface with too - i did it with a pi pico microcontroller: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1753585604971917313

I don't want a camera the size of a grain of salt! At least not while surveillance capitalism and creeping authoritariarism are in full swing...

as an optic scientists i would protest my work being lumped zogether with the psychedelics of AIchemists

The article was published in 2021. Why do they repost this as "news" three years later?

There is some optics thing that looks cool, but it doesn't say how the image is actually recorded.

Then there is the whole "neural" part. Do these get "enhanced" by a generative AI that fills the blur based on the most statistically likely pixels?

The article is pretty bad.

> The meta-optics camera is the first device of its kind to produce full-color images that are equal in quality to those produced by conventional cameras, which are an order of magnitude larger. In fact, the meta-optics camera is 500,000 times smaller than conventional cameras that capture the same level of image quality.

That would make them 6 orders of magnitude larger.

lmao of course the image looks like those monster pov shots from a 1980s horror movie

Can we agree that in the field of cameras we surpassed science fiction?

I can remember watching a TV series as a child where a time traveler went back to the 80s and some person told him that everything is about miniaturization. Then he pointed to a little pin on the time traveler's jacket, which was actually a camera, and said: "This little pin for example could one day hold a full video camera", which seemed a bit ridiculous at that time.

It's interesting how they mention beneficial impacts on medicine and science in general, but everyone knows that the first applications will likely be military and surveillance.

Maybe I'm being too skeptical, and certainly I am only a layman in this field, but the amount of ANN-based post-processing it takes to produce the final image seems to cast suspicion on the meaning of the result.

At what point do you reduce the signal to the equivalent of an LLM prompt, with most of the resulting image being explained by the training data?

Yeah, I know that modern phone cameras are also heavily post-processed, but the hardware is at least producing a reasonable optical image to begin with. There's some correspondence between input and output; at least they're comparable.

(2021) The real story: https://light.princeton.edu/publication/neural-nano-optics/

In The Culture series books, there's a concept of "smart dust". Basically dust sized surveillance drones that they cover planets with, that lets them see and hear everything that's going on.

This seems like it's going to ne a serious problem for privacy... not that anyone cares.

This kind of thing -- that humans can do today with current technology -- is why if an ET intelligence that could travel interstellar distances wanted to observe us we would never know unless they wanted us to know.

Their probes could be the size of sand grains, maybe even dust. Maybe not quite sophons, but not much better as far as our odds of finding anything. I suppose there would have to be something larger to receive signals from these things and send them back (because physics), but that could be hanging out somewhere we'd be unlikely to see it.

Yet another Fermi paradox answer: we are looking for big spacecraft when the universe is full of smart dust.

No link in the article to the actual paper?

Is it possible to make an orbital death laser with this?

Not a single mention of the obvious privacy concerns in the article