Those images are certainly impressive, but I certainly don't agree with the statement "equal in quality to those produced by conventional cameras": they're quite obviously lacking in sharpness and color.

Also interesting: the paper is from 2021.

> Ultrathin meta-optics utilize subwavelength nano-antennas to modulate incident light with greater design freedom and space-bandwidth product over conventional diffractive optical elements (DOEs).

Is this basically a visible-wavelength beamsteering phased array?

How does this work? If it's just reconstructing the images with nn, a la Samsung pasting a picture of the moon when it detected a white disc on the image, it's not very impressive.

Maybe it's possible but i can't i seem to think of an energy harvesting Method that would fit that system without direct sunlight.

I'm very skeptical this technology already exists. Maybe if you vastly change the meaning of "sticker"

Also the scatterable surveillance cameras used in his other great novel, 'The Peace War' [0]. Although IIRC they were the size of seeds or similar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peace_War

I've been interested in smart dust for a while; recently the news seems to have dried up, and while that may have been other stuff taking up all the attention (and investment money), I suspect that many R&D teams went under government NDAs because they are now good enough to be interesting.

I wonder if someone tried to build a localizer how small they could actually be made?

PS It's "Vernor"

Or Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular, where the “orphidnet” utility fog enables universal perception/visualization.

I haven't read deepness in the sky but it's interesting how wrong alot of scifi got this. Cameras are always considerably bigger than grains of sand

Thank you!

It's been a while since I've heard anyone talk about the Starshot project[0]. Maybe this would help revitalize it.

Also even without aiming for Proxima Centauri, it would be great to have more cameras in our own planetary system.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

we would also need a transmitter of equivalent size to send those images back. also an energy source

Are they not? Every modern camera does the same thing. Upscaling, denoising, deblurring, adjusting colors, bumping and dropping shadows and highlights, pretty much no aspect of the picture is the way the sensor sees it once the rest of the pipeline is done. Phone cameras do this to a more extreme degree than say pro cameras, but they all do it.

If you eat something the size of a grain of salt that isn't digestible, excreting it poses no problem.

you could detect the supporting electronics with a nonlinear junction detector but they are not cheap

Some rough numbers:

The paper says that reconstructing an actual image from the raw data produced by the sensor takes ~58ms of computation, so doing it for 10,000 sensors would naively take around ten minutes, though I'm sure there's room for optimization and parallelization.

The sensors produce 720x720px images, so a 100x100 array of them would produce 72,000x72,000px images, or ~5 gigapixels. That's a lot of pixels for a smartphone to push around and process and store.

Sensor size is super important for resulting quality, that's why pros still lug around huge full frame (even if mirrorless) cameras and not run around with phones. There are other reasons ie speed for sports but lets keep it simple (also speed is affected by data amount processed, which goes back to resolution).

Plus higher resolution sensors have this nasty habit of producing too large files, processing of which slows down given devices compared to smaller, crisper photos and they take much more space, even more so for videos. That's probably why Apple held to 12mpix main camera for so long, there were even 200mpix sensors available around if wanted.

The watchers would be able to blackmail/control anybody who engages in private activities that they don't want to be public. So who watches the watchers? And who watches them? No. Privacy is 100% required in a free society.

Unless you're in your own home, I think it's basically a guarantee at this point that you're being recorded. Could be CCTV, trail cameras, some random recording a TikTok, etc...

> ppl are usually their best selves when they are being watched.

I don't think that view holds up.

A, it very much depends on who is watching, what their incentives are, and what power they hold.

And B, it also depends on who is being watched - not everyone thrives under a microscope. Are they the type to feel stifled? Or rebellious?

That will only hold while being watched is rare. See Clarke and Baxter's Light of Other Days for an examination of the consequences of ubiquitous surveillance.

How will it be all that different than the ubiquitous imaging we have now?

The Air Force was already publicly talking about such things in 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_5YkQ9w3PJ4

You would still have to power the thing and store the data etc. This is just about the lense.

I've seen someone on this site comment to the effect that if they could use a tool like dall-e to generate a picture of "their dog" that looked better than a photo they could take themselves, they would happily take it over a photo.

The future is going to become difficult for people who find value in creative activities, beyond just a raw audio/visual/textual signal at the output. I think most people who really care about a creative medium would say there's some kind of value in the process and the human intentionality that creates works, both for the creator who engages in it and the audience who is aware of it.

In my opinion most AI creative tools don't actually benefit serious creators, they just provide a competitive edge for companies to sell new products and enable more dilettantes to enter the scene and flood us with mediocrity

It is possible to create realistic images and videos with AI, making anyone do anything. Whether a photo or video is real or not will soon be impossible to distinguish, and it won't matter to those who want to cause harm

It’s in the "Further Reading" section at the bottom: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26443-0

For those who want to cause harm (discredit), they don't need a real photo; AI is enough

Just file a complaint with the United Nations Ethics Czar. Oh.. wait.

And since it's AI improved, all of th will hurt people because of hallucinations.

I don't trust human to avoid taking shorcuts once the tech is available, it's too convenient to have "information" for so cheap, and less costly to silence the occasional scandal.

> but everyone knows that the first applications will likely be military and surveillance.

military, surveillance and porn