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I always say "on a scale from no canoe to a $5K canoe, even the crappiest canoe is 80% of the way there". This camera illustrates that for vision. When you hear about those visual implants that give you, say, 16x16 grayscale you think that's nothing. Yet 30x30 grayscale as seen in this video, especially with live updates and not just a still frame is... vision. Not 80% of the way there, but does punch way above its weight class in terms of usefulness.
Diminishing returns explained through canoes :)

16x16 sounds really shit for me who still has perfect vision indeed but I bet it's life changing to be able to identify presence / absence of stuff around you and such! Yay for technology!

The moment you add motion and temporal continuity, even a postage-stamp image turns into something your brain can work with
I have to say, the Game Boy camera doesn't have only 4 colors. It has an analog output you can connect to your own ADC with more bits and get more shades of gray. I even managed to get color pictures out of it by swapping color filters and combining the images.
These kind of news are for me the real news for this website instead of a new fancy tech product of Apple or similar corporation.

Sincerely a lot of thanks.

Impressive. That's what I read HN for!
Just in case the author is here: what's the FPS?
Very cool project. I love the detail the poster went into in their linked video post about working with the sensor and their implementation.

> Optical computer mice work by detecting movement with a photoelectric cell (or sensor) and a light. The light is emitted downward, striking a desk or mousepad, and then reflecting to the sensor. The sensor has a lens to help direct the reflected light, enabling the mouse to convert precise physical movement into an input for the computer’s on-screen cursor. The way the reflected changes in response to movement is translated into cursor movement values.

I can't tell if this grammatical error is a result of nonchalant editing and a lack of proofreading or a person touching-up LLM content.

> It’s a clever solution for a fundamental computer problem: how to control the cursor. For most computer users, that’s fine, and they can happily use their mouse and go about their day. But when Dycus came across a PCB from an old optical mouse, which they had saved because they knew it was possible to read images from an optical mouse sensor, the itch to build a mouse-based camera was too much to ignore.

Ah, it's an LLM. Dogshit grifter article. Honestly, the HN link should be changed to the reddit post.

"I made a camera from an optical mouse. 30x30 pixels in 64 glorious shades of gray!"

I wonder why so many shades of grey? Fancy!

(Yeah, the U.K. spelling of "grey" looks more "gray" to these American eyes.)

Hilarious too that this article is on Petapixel. (Centipixel?)

What I love most is that it takes something we all interact with every day
This is fantastic. What an amazing project! There is a certain segment of photography enthusiasts who love the aesthetic.
These are 'optical flow' chips. They are quite interesting for many reasons.
Waiting until someone builds a high speed camera using mouse sensors.