“A camera capable of taking and creating images with unprecedented details has been unveiled” – BBC.
The AWARE-2 Camera System
The strength of a camera is determined, mainly, by how good the qualities of the pictures are. If I zoom in while taking a picture, will the images blur or break? This depends on the amount of details that can be captured; in essence, how many megapixels the camera can capture.
So many camera manufacturers are today spending more time in their workshops hoping to produce the best quality cameras and making sure they lead the pack of competitors. Today’s cameras range from around 8 Megapixels to 40 Megapixels, with the highest commercially available camera being on a phone—the Nokia 808 Pureview Smartphone which can take pictures of up to 41 Megapixels.
Now, there might be something that can do exceedingly better. According to the BBC, “a camera capable of taking and creating images with unprecedented details has been unveiled.” This camera can take pictures of up to 50 GigaPixels—this is the point where you say wow. 1 Gigapixel = 1 billion pixels; this means that 50 Gigapixesl = 50 billion Pixels. That’s a whole lot of details which will obviously include previously undetected images.
Photo: smashingtips.com
Looking at the image directly above, you see that without zooming you’d think it’s just a city view but, then, the tiniest element when zoomed shows that there’s a lot of story behind it. The camera prototype dubbed AWARE-2, which is capable of taking pictures equivalent of up to 50,000 megapixels, was built by a team of engineers led by David Brady, from Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, and Michael J. Fitzpatrick, along with scientists from the University of Arizona, and the University of California. They received funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA.
The prototype camera itself is two-and-half feet square and twenty inches deep. It is made up of microcameras. “Each one of the microcameras captures information from a specific area of the field of view,” Brady said.
Obviously no individual would want to carry a camera this size about. You obviously cannot use it now as it is not commercially available, but we hope to see a portable version in the near future, one that can be available to everyone. With the rate and speed with which technology is growing, it’s most likely going to take a just a few years.
