Insect eyes

Another amazing piece of curved artificial eyes from John Roger's lab at UIUC.

The internet of lights

This NYT article has a great quote: "whenever there is lighting, there is data being created." While folks who work with projector-camera systems have known the usefulness of coupled control of illumination and imaging, a similar philosophy has begun to seep into manufacturers of general lighting fixtures. The first wave was the (sort of) obvious class of smart bulbs that allow you to control their color and intensity with your smartphone. Now, one of the new goals is to convert all outdoor lighting into low-level security sensors. Another direction is to control illumination in the workplace over the course of the day, to improve productivity. Lots of low-power, embedded, camera or photodetector-based problems exist in this space.

Chiplets

Xerox PARC is working on a type of ink called "chiplets" which they hope will allow 3D printing of flexible electronics. 

Beautiful sculptures of deadly, tiny creatures

Perhaps the most interesting piece of nanotechnology is the biological virus. I recently learned that the known viruses present on Earth outnumber all other species put together. This is their planet and we just happen to live here. The website of Studio 360 has some examples of lovely glass sculptures of some famous viruses. The transparent nature of glass and the strange virus structure combine to give a stunning effect.

Millimeter scale computers

Researchers in the University of Michigan have created a very small, complete computer. While the news article I found doesn't specify an imaging sensor, a preliminary web-page on the lab's website does talk about an imaging device on such a tiny computer.

Printing of small metal wires

An amazing piece of work from UIUC, where they demonstrate how to print microscale silver wires that allow 3D printing of very tiny electronics. The link is to a video where the technology is demonstrated.

A very high resolution binary sensor

I've been reading this article from EPFL, about a new kind of imaging sensor. Each pixel, or photodetector, measures the light by producing a binary value of either 0 or 1. So, each pixel is, loosely speaking, a photon counter. The advantage of this sensor is that it has the potential to be really fast (high frame rate). Once such binary data is collected, a grayscale image can be obtained from it by applying image processing techniques. This is similar to what the eye does when it sees the spatial dithering in newspaper halftones.