I’ve finally had the chance to play Cyberpunk 2077 over the last few weekends, and it’s an amazing feat of graphics programming, especiall

Why cameras are soon going to be everywhere

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2022-06-22 20:00:05

I’ve finally had the chance to play Cyberpunk 2077 over the last few weekends, and it’s an amazing feat of graphics programming, especially with ray-tracing enabled. I’ve had fun, but I have been struck by how the cyberpunk vision of the future is rooted in the ’80s. Even though William Gibson was incredibly prescient in so many ways, the actual future we’re living in is increasingly diverging from the one he painted. One of the differences that struck me most was how cameras exist in the game’s world, compared to what I can see happening as an engineer working in the imaging field. They still primarily show up as security cameras, brick-sized devices that are attached to walls and would look familiar to someone from forty years ago.

A lot of people still share the expectation that cameras will be obvious, standalone components of a system. Even though phone cameras and webcams are smaller, they still have a noticeable physical presence, and often come with indicators like red lights that show when they’re recording. What is clear to me from my work is that these assumptions aren’t going to hold much longer. Soon imaging sensors will be so small, cheap, and energy efficient that they’ll be added to many more devices in our daily lives, and because they’re so tiny they won’t even be noticeable!

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