Posts Tagged ‘sensor technology’
DARPA and GE Look to Butterfly Wings for Better Chemical Sensors
The research team discovered a few years ago that the scales on Morphos butterfly wings have extremely fine-tuned sensing abilities that can pick molecules out of the atmospheric noise. Nano-level structures underneath the colorful scales on the butterflies' wings react to different vapors, changing the spectral reflectivity of the wings depending on what they are exposed to.
DARPA wants GE to engineer highly specific, highly sensitive sensors that can do the exact same thing. Scientists will attempt to recreate those nanostructures from scratch, an undertaking that should teach GE researchers a lot about nanotech construction even if it doesn't yield the desired sensors. But if successful, DARPA should come out of the deal with sensors ranging from just 5 microns up to the size of an ID badge that can accurately pick out even very low concentrations of vapors from a chemically crowded atmosphere.
Such sensors could be embedded in clothing and designed to change color if they detect a chemical or biological threat, or they could be spread out over a large region like confetti to help the military identify areas where certain substances non grata might be hiding or lingering. In the civilian world, they might be used to detect disease on a patient's breath, monitor pollution coming from industrial plants, and maintaining food safety.
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New Camera Captures 3-D Video Through Single Lens, Using Novel Laser Sensor Tech
And that's not all: The camera's sensor also records the smallest pixel currently in the field, a mere ten millionths of a meter (roughly one tenth the size of a human hair). Add it all up, and it's one pretty sweet piece of machinery, with the ability to capture not only the highest quality of detail in images, but to produce a depth of vision you can only get by adding the third dimension.
The camera employs a sophisticated range-finding technique to add depth to its frames, bathing its subjects in ultra-short laser light pulses (ultra-short being just a few billionths of a second) that bounce off the subjects much like radar. A complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) micro-sensor picks up the laser bursts as they return to the camera, measuring each pixel's distance from the camera. From that data, the camera can place each pixel in space, adding a third dimension to its vision.
While the obvious film-making implications of such a device conjure James-Cameron-esque fantasies, the applications are far wider. The researchers envision the camera sensor assisting the elderly and disabled, its reliable eye for spatial arrangements keeping watch for dangerous situations that could cause falls or other accidents. Security cameras fitted with such a sensor could be greatly improved with a third dimension enhancing their ability to follow a subject in a crowd. The same tech could aid smarter guidance systems that could give turn by turn instructions to a person as they navigate the corridors of unfamiliar buildings.
We're more interested in video games. A 3-D camera could not only "see" a player moving in 3-D, but could add a third axis of sophistication to those movements by "seeing" when a player moves forward or backward in space. This kind of technology could lead to a true peripheral-free era of gaming where players need nothing more than their consoles and their own bodily movements to achieve a seriously sophisticated gaming experience.
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