transparent cameras?

don't expect to see (or not see) one soon but this is interesting technology

(of course a camera would need to have one side black or the image would be from the front and the back)

You may be about to see the world in a whole new way. MIT researchers, reporting in this month's issue of Nature Materials, have demonstrated that nearly transparent webs made up of novel semiconducting fibers could replace lenses and sensors in cameras, and, among other things, lead to uniforms or automobile exteriors that give people a continuous view of their surroundings.

The fibers are made of a semiconducting glass core, lined along its full length by wires that act as positive and negative electrodes, and surrounded by a transparent polymer (see link to images below). When light hits the photosensitive core, an electrical current in the fiber changes, registering the hit.

much more at
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17220&ch=infotech

Transparent uniforms, huh? Makes Hans Christian Anderson's story about The Emperor's New Clothes sound positively prescient.

pbolton said:

You may be about to see the world in a whole new way. MIT
researchers, reporting in this month's issue of Nature Materials,
have demonstrated that nearly transparent webs made up of novel
semiconducting fibers could replace lenses and sensors in cameras,
and, among other things, lead to uniforms or automobile exteriors
that give people a continuous view of their surroundings.

Click to expand...

Color me crazy, but if it is transparent, that means the light gets thru, doesnt it?

So, one can only conclude that a small portion of the incident photons are absorbed by the material - that is, it seems like it must have low sensitivity.

Perhaps I just need to learn more about this...

-Eric

Not only would a "transparent camera" not absorb very much of the photon source... (There's a whole discussin on some sci-fi web site about whether the Invisible Man would actually be blind.)

Unless the sensor area is shielded - the area between the lens and the sensor - then the sensor will be flooded by ambient light. It would be like trying to make out the image on a piece of film that was also given an exposure to broad daylight.

You need some form of control to ensure a pixel sensor is only seeing 1 part of the image -whether it's a lens or diffraction grating or pinhole, or a long thin tube like an insect's compound eye.

I'm curious whether they've got some clever design, or whether the article's authour has misinterpreted the information.

It's about some sort of cheap light sensitive tissue for large surfaces covering. Like wrapping an entire building.

I think it has low sensitivity, but also very low resolution. To a point, the smaller the distance between wires inside the nets and the larger the distance between the two nets, the larger the resolution. But if the wires within the outer net are too close, the light reaching the second net is disturbed (reflected, refracted) by the outer fibers. So, it has a theoretical limited resolution, given by those distances and the fiber's diameter.