CCDs: a great disruptor lurking in the tech

Here's a fascinating rumination on the Bitworking site about how much of the promise of RFID tags is being realized by charge-coupled devices (CCDs — the sensor in your digital camera) instead. CCDs seems to be subject to Moore's Law, and are falling in price and increasing in capacity at an alarming rate. The potential applications are significant:

Put them on a car and point them out and you have a backup camera. Buy why restrict it to just backing up? Why isn't the rear-view mirror a full panorama of the environment around the whole car stitched together from a dozen CCD cameras?

That's pointing out from the car, point them at the car and the possibilities are different. Put them next to highways to monitor rushhour traffic. Point them at your license plate and you have either an automatic red-light running ticket writing machine, or a new toll system, where a camera based system that reads license plates could be used instead of the current RFID based solutions.

Put them on your house pointing outwards and you have a security system. Point them into the house and you have a system that turns the lights and HVAC off in rooms that are empty. Think how much better it would be than those motion sensing systems in some meeting rooms today, where the lights switch off in the room and everyone waves their hands in the air like a bunch of drunk pelicans trying to get the lights back.

If I hang one over my kitchen table will it be able to count calories for me? Can I hang one over my desk and not need to buy a scanner? How about one in the bathroom? How much health information could you extract from an image taken every morning? Could it track my weight? Detect signs of depression? Obviously there are security and privacy concerns.

CCD

(via Making Light)

(Image: CCD, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from AMagill's Flickr stream)