Single Pixel Cameras

I'm a photographer, and like always, more resolution is better. It would be interesting if they could find a way to use existing image sensors to take several pictures, of the light bouncing off of mirrors. The camera could stitch those several images together (like I already do in photoshop or other panorama making software) very quickly. This would be quite amazing if it could be done with any speed, because it could make some things possible. For example it's impossible to make good panoramas of bodies of water with fast exposures, because waves move, and they will be in different places by the next picture. If you could get the camera to take pictures in rapid succession while the mirrors move the view on the sensor, you could get some amazing panoramas.

That must be quite the series of mirrors and micro mechanics in that device, if it can move around 30,000 times in 15 minutes, and have any repeatability.

Any of the large projection TVs based on the so-called DLP (Digital Light Processor) technology use an array of micro-mirrors to form the image. These arrays contain nearly (or over) a million mirrors and are fabricated on a silicon chip about the size of your thumbnail. Each mirror in the array is suspended by a torsion spring fabricated out of the same chunk of silicon as the chip (and no, silicon is not flexible in bulk, but at these scales a slender filament of silicon behaves more like a rubber band). The mirrors rotate about a single axis and are deflected electrostatically by nearby electrodes. The mirrors operate independently of each other and, although I don't recall offhand how fast they operate, I do know that systems based on DLP technology seem to have no problem displaying full-motion video. When I read the "one-pixel camera" article, I wondered if the researchers were using some form of DLP technology for the mirrors. --Europium