Flexible "camera" fabric

MIT researchers developed light-detecting fibers that could eventually be woven into a "fabric camera." Instead of counting on a single lens, the new system would use a web of the fibers as a distributed imaging surface. Imagine a shirt where the entire back is a "camera." From MIT News:

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Yoel Fink of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), emphasize that while such an application and others like it are still only dreams, work is rapidly progressing on developing fabrics capable of capturing images. In a recent issue of the journal Nanoletters, the team reported what it called a “significant” advance: using such a fiber web to take a rudimentary picture of a smiley face.

“This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or ‘fabric,’ can collect images just like a camera but without a lens,” said Fink, corresponding author of the Nanoletters paper. “This work constitutes a new approach to vision and imaging.”

"'Flexible camera' replaces lens with fiber web"

• [Anonymous]

  Amazing I went to photography school in 1954
  amazing what’s to be.
  How did we ever shoot and not know what we had in
  advance????

• [noen]

  How does it focus? That’s what the embedded nanoscale neuro net processor is for.

• [JL Bryan]

  Big Brother was watching, until he realized how incredibly boring most of us are.

• [The Unusual Suspect]

  “Big Brother was watching, until he realized how incredibly boring most of us are.”

  That’s when Big Brother started making up new crimes to watch us for.

• [dagfooyo]

  The article says this works as an alternative to a lens. I may be missing something but.. how does it focus then? Wouldn’t you end up with a fuzzy noisy mush image, where the photons captured had to do with whatever direction that individual fiber was pointing?

• [mdh]

  Neat, but I want paint that does that.

• [The Unusual Suspect]

  Couple this with a flexible, wearable display to show on one side of your body what the camera sees on the other side, and there’s your cloak of invisibility.

• [Reverend Loki]

  #2, I was thinking almost the same thing. Although what you will want would be a similar fiber that acts as a small display, that can change it’s color at an instant’s notice. Even if it can only siplay one color at a time, if you put this interlaced with the fiber cameras, you can at least have a dynamic camouflage that adjusts automatically to fit whatever your setting is, where the size of one display thread = one “camo pixel”. Not perfect, but possibly good enough to fool a scanning eye.

• [mdh]

  #3 – make it a self-organizing pixel-addressable nano-paint and we might make anything invisible – or, more likely, make anything into a billboard.

• [Anonymous]

  big. brother. is. coming.

• [GuidoDavid]

  Great. Now they have the perfect excuse to make us strip naked in the name of security and the war against photography.

• [noen]

  Shades of Larry Niven.

• [PaulR]

  The researchers, … emphasize that while such an application and others like it are still only dreams…

  Hmm…

  Better info here:
  http://www.rle.mit.edu/rleonline/ProgressReports/2009_26.pdf

  It seems that the whole is less that the summary that Phys/Org provides…: as a shirt-camera, it’d be useless. As a tool for detecting where a laser-scope beam is coming from, there’s potential there.

  Um, as long as the shirt is completely rigid. And has a built-in compass. And a GPS. And a computer. And wifi. And…

• [PaulR]

  Oops: That first like should have been in quotes, as it was excerpted for the linked-to article.

• [moniker42]

  Terrifying.

• [Anonymous]

  The “Journal of Nanoletters”? Do they have a big print edition?