Slashdot Mirror
Cheap Cell Phone Cameras
prostoalex writes "Apparently an Israeli company figured out the way to put a 376x296 digital camera into cell phones for less than $15." We've done previous stories about a PDA/phone with included camera, but this could be integrated into a regular phone so that your conversation partner could get a nice real-time view of your ear.
At least you can see if someone's listening or the phone is on the table..
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!
Now we can get a full ear examination through our ears.
Look a monkey!
What happens when you run out of the shower to answer a ringing phone... see, thats when you need a camera.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
What if they put a camera in this tooth mobile phone?
Now people on the other side can go: "brush your teeth!" instead of "clean you ear!".
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
The research is on to produce a long-lasting, cheap LiIon battery to power mobile phones augmented with a camera. And why are accessories so freakin' expensive?! I think I paid $30 for a leather case last time!
1.) Cell phones are definitely getting banned in cars now.
2.) Could be useful if you have an ear infection and call your doctor tho. Add one of those thinkgeek diode flashlights...
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
So if I combine this technology with yesterday's story about the cellphone in the tooth, I can take pictures of my teeth? http://slashdot.org/articles/02/06/19/145211.shtml ?tid=126
Some people like to use their cell phones in alot of odd places, but the person on the other end has no idea where they are. I kinda wouldn't want to see some of the stuff going on when you interrupt someone by calling their cell phone.
The Uber
http://www.tulg.org/
http://devurandom.livejournal.com/
Check this page where Nokia show their new 7650 - supposed to get to the European market at the end of the second quarter of 2002. This features a build in camera for sending images via MMS. I already tried it at the Cebit this year and it looks great ...
Cheers,
bebroll
.bbr
fear women playing with delete functions ...
next time it could be you .
they use them to spy on women in changing rooms...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
doesnt matter anyway, cell networks will not have enuf bandwidth til 3g
Let's say we put that video feature in our cell phones. It's an interesting, even nice idea for us geeks out here. If we've left that phone on all the time, and those phones are sending minimal signals back to local towers, so they can track where we are, thereby giving us the best signal ...why wouldn't the phone ROM include code to allow someone to wake the phone remotely, and activate the audio pickup, and now the camera?
That would be a darn convenient trick if one of our fine government agencies who have broad wire tapping powers, could do. Imagine how easy it would be to track the movements and activities of a suspected criminal! You could just remotely turn on his phone, and listen in while he does a drug deal. Maybe even get incriminating footage!
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
The problem with real-time video isn't figuring out how to get a camera into the phone, its a question of bandwidth. Second generation (2G) phones only have about 14.4 Kbps available to them to share between voice and data using a single traffic channel. Newer systems, such as some 2.5G and 3G systems, have substantially more bandwidth available. 1X systems, a 3G extension, has quite a lot of bandwidth available and I have seen a demo of real-time streaming video on these phones. Very impressive stuff. The only problem is that for the most part, the high-bandwidth standards generally expect that you won't be moving, or moving very slowly, when you are using high-bandwidth applications.
One method of achieving the high-throughput is to allocate your call multiple traffic channels. One of the problems lies in handing off from cell to cell as you are moving down the highway. Getting the handoff scheduled, and perhaps even rerouting the data to the new cell, isn't really the problem. Its what to do if there just aren't enough traffic channels available to accomodate your usage on the next cell, or any cell that could service you.
Couple that with the fact that I think that most people are more interested in having higher cell-phone reliability than ooh-ah features, add in financially troubled providers, and I think that it will be quite a while before we actually see this in the US. Europe may be differnt as they seem to be lower on the curve of early adopters.
something clever
Just think what the pr0n industry would do with this! They're always early adopters - wireless pr0n!
Conventional digital cameras use relatively expensive charge-coupled chips (CCD). A newer, but lower quality method uses the same technology as computer chips to make sensors for about a dollar. These have been used in toys such as the Game Boy, Barbie, and Hello Kitty cameras.
what would be really nice would be if they could use those cameras to provide a wireless feed to a remote location in real time. But I don't think the bandwidth is quite there yet.
Picture a webcam that goes anywhere.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
It should make wiretapping that much easier. Just add the faulty facual recognition program and then you know if the guy you are tracking is talking with others that you might have an interest in, or is having a private conversation with his doctor.
Humor aside, am I the only one who is bothered by the ability to use the camera in way which where not intended.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
While some of the lack has to be due to the low picture quality, some of it is simply due to the fact that phones are NOT A VISUAL MEDIUM. A person using a phone is doing so to communicate verbally, not with body langugae. Until a new form factor emerges for visual communication (I like the communicators in EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT) I think this kind of work is a dead end.
"All they would see is the inside of your ear"
If you have speakerphone on your cell phone... You would just hold it in front of you.
I would also agree that 15 bucks is great for a camera attachment, but most cell phones don't have color screens yet, and I think a b&w pic is pretty pointless. I think they should focus on getting video phones in our houses first...
Although from the looks of this article maybe its all going to be the same...
Just my $.02
Cramming a small camera in a cell phone results only in useless crappy quality pictures. Not a good idea.
Putting a cell phone - or network connection - to digital cameras is a much nicer idea.
Yesterday, I purchased Sony TRV50E digital video camera that has Bluetooth connection. By chance, I happen to own a Nokia 6310i cell phone, which has Bluetooth and GPRS.
TRV50E has a built-in web browser and mail client in the camera and 3,5 inch touch-screen. I can now take 1300x1024 stills with the video camera, or 320x240 MPEG-2s, and write normal e-mails and attach the stills or video clips as email attachments, using the cell phone as a modem. It's also nice to surf the web using a "large" screen and a stylus, much nicer than with any WAP crap.
Rather nice web-pad...ehm...web-brick, eh?
Well, in theory; the video camera connects just fine with the cell phone, and makes a PPP connection, but the GPRS connection fails for some reason. I'm investigating the problem, but unfortunately these cameras and cell phones are not yet too common even here in Finland...
And you could get nice real-time audio of him looking at your ear.
1.) Cell phones are definitely getting banned in cars now.
Hmm. Let's just forget about a hands-free kit and mount your phone to your front bumper. That - combined with a way to remotely stear the car with the cell phone at the other end - should give you the ultimate Pole Position experience! And on top of that: it's much safer to crash your car when you're not in it!
these cheap cameras are basically camera obscuras. no lenses, just a small enough hole to define the image. It works, but I remember seeing these somewhere before, and not just in Cryptonomicon
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
if the camera is on the other side of the phone, looking away from the person talking... It'll be the end of:
Husband: No honey, i'm not at the strip club! I'm just working late.
As someone who drives a high riding truck I can tell you over the years I have seen some strange stuff. Specially dudes on the high way with the crucise locked jerking the old chicken at 80 miles an hour. I guess you gotta do someone on those long trips.
But now with a camera, yech, suppose mom calls?
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
If its in the receiver, then you get a great shot of your earwax
:-)
if its in the mouthpiece, you'll get a free tonsil inspection
if it's on the back... well. you'll get a shot of your hand.
Too bad the camera doesn't have flash though. I could just imagine it for cell-phone drivers.
"These camera phones are great! Yes, buy the phone company stocks, buy! BUY!"
"Actually, now that I have had a chance to think about it. Sell the phone stocks."
~ kjrose
Why would someone want a crappy camera in a cell phone anyway. Like the previous posters said, a view of my earwax. I read something on a tooth phone yesterday. Great, a way to introduce the radiation directly to your brain stem. When will we ever learn.
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
You could combine it with the previous story -- law enforcement will be chasing you around wanting to hang you out of an aircraft for surveilance!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
'Ring ring'
'Hello?'
'It's me, I'm at the store, do you want ceiling fixtures that look like THIS?'
'Nah that's the wrong shape, find something octagonal'
'MMMk - ciao!'
...using a regular computer: Check it out!
im not in any way affiliated with the site...
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
get a nice real-time view of your ear
Well, in the good old days, when you wanted someone to see your ear, you cut if off and sent it to them!
Have you read my journal today?
To improve reception, we'll have to start using sub-dermal antennas. Just a few quick slices of the scalp and insert a permanent high-gain antenna. Of course, to reduce the radiation, we'll use lead shielding under the antenna. Then, to prevent lead poisoning, we'll use surgical stainless steel sheathing. By the time it's all over, your head will look like a baseball, but you'll get almost 2/3 the reception of a normal cell phone!
And there's always the screw-on external antenna - but that requires drilling a socket in your skull.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I think picture messaging (part of MMS [Multimedia Messaging Service] in GPRS networks) will be huge, and this camera chip will help it take off. If you can send a picture to anyone with an MMS mobile phone or an email account, you can send postcards to friends and 'how do I fix this' messages to suitable experts, and get 'top 5 goals' messages, photos from Internet personal ads, etc... The more people have a camera built into their phone, the more they will use it (though probably never as much as plain text SMS).
MMS phones are already available in Europe (Ericsson T68i, with Nokia 7650 soon) where MMS is just starting - in Japan, J-Phone has had a huge success with picture messaging, known as Sha-Mail (over 4 million picture messaging handsets sold). Watch this space...
Even if you don't have a mobile phone, you'll be able to send email with picture/sound/video attachments to anyone with an MMS phone.
...combine it with the tooth cell, and get a real live shot of the world through the callers mouth :)
dmarien
Couple this with the previous story about Microsoft working to create a 'standard' codec for mobile phones, and you could have bad news!
Maybe they see this market coming and want to be in the middle of it before it even starts, with there own patented video codec alongside the 'open' audio codec they are working to create.
What are the odds that any video phone would use entirely open systems?
Everytime someone suggests putting a camera in mobile phone, there's always a bunch of people who assume that it would be used for videoconferencing purposes or high-rez photography, and whine about how useless it is. Get a clue. There are very good reasons to have even a low-rez camera in your phone, some of them more useful than having a phone/PDA combo. Consider the REAL uses:
1) How many times have you been somewhere where you REALLY wished you had a camera, but you didn't. How often did you have your mobile phone? (assuming you had one at all)
2) Have you ever been in a situation where you would have liked to quickly relay your situation to someone, i.e. you're witnessing a crime in progress, someone ran into your car and you'd like to keep a record of the situation, you need to describe a location to someone who's familiar with the area, etc.
3) Have you ever run out of storage on your camera, or wanted to send pictures or streaming video for live updates to something on the web?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
There's a great idea! Naked phone chat.
How many times have I been on the phone and told the person I was speaking to "I wish you could see this too!" If the bandwith issue was ever worked out, you could use an earpiece and point the phone at whatever you wanted the person to see.
Who cares about realtime.. There's so many times when I see another Dodge Neon with "Viper Series" stickers all over it with painted/flaking calipers/wheels, man.. To be able to always get pictures of those ricers and expose them to the world, well, I'd pay $2k for one of those phones.
Besides, I heard people use webcams to chat naked. Anyone knows how to intercept those streams *grin*?
(I was the Anonymous poster - accidentally clicked "Post Anonymously" *sigh*)
"your conversation partner could get a nice real-time view of your ear"
but only if they had eyes inside their ears. I start to worry about Michael and his friends...
What is the big news here? J-Phone in Japan
has been selling mobile phones with cameras for
the last two years now. DoCoMo now makes its own
line, and the J-Phones can now send short movies.
The US is way behind in mobile phone technology,
with a divided and hopelessly bug-ridden wireless data infrastructure, due to the greed and stupidity of the wireless carriers and the "WAP" idiocy.
While it is not $15, Casio has fit a black and white digital camera into a watch that can save 100 pictures, if memory serves me.
About $250 I believe
Casio's Camera Watch.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
The most common conversation:
Other end: Hows it goin...
Your end: Fine, lemme turn on my camera.
Other end: Alright but to see your picture I need to attach my lcd to my phone.
*** 5 minutes later ***
Other End: Pictures coming in fine.. May I suggest a Q-tip? BTW, how are you able to hear what I'm saying?
Your End: Maybe it isn't poor connectivity...
(you get cut off)
Other End: Wow look at that eardrum resonate.
Your End: Cool.
Other End: Cool.
*** another minute passes ***
Other End: This is boring.
Your End: Lemme show you the hole in my pocket.
Other End: No wait!! Ahh!
*** Disconnect ***
Well, there are many cute Arab girls in Israeli universities - especially Huji. I'd love to date them (except of the mad ones who carry pictures of shahids).
This message was brought to you by The Holy NVWS. Thank you for reading it. Btw: I am looking for a girlfriend
if you read the article you might actually notice this:
This device is expected to be ready in two years.
So, in other words, by the time this thing gets released, it will be obsolete.
The company may as well file for bankruptcy right now.
I Agree a 40 x 120 pixel b&w screen is useless. Personally, I feel the same about the "high-res" colour screens in i-mode phones - or the preview panels on photo camera's for that matter. Hopefully (in the unforeseeable future) we'll have video beamers small and cheap enough to fit into our phones.
Still, $15 dollars for the camera is a good start for Starwars-like holographic communicators!
Well, your wife would see that you hold the phone three foot from your ear whenever she starts screaming at you.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
They're talking about having made a cheap chip - it doesn't mention anything about including a CCD with that.
Such things exist already - my espion digital camera cost £40 (for the whole camera - and it's about 1cm x 3cm x 5cm in size), and it's based on the ST Microelectronics STV0680 chipset The chipset supports 8Mb memory - up to 640x480 resolution, has USB client controller built in, will drive an LCD display, and works as a USB webcam. Basically all you need to do to make a digital camera is connect a CCD with a lens, a couple of buttons, a USB plug and a battery to it and you're done.
This chip sounds very similar, but it hardly sounds new.
a friends company in NZ approached nokia nearly 7 years ago w/ the blueprints for adding a camera to the existing nokia line complete w/ empeg encoding & display for under $30NZ (that's roughly $15US), keep in mind the drop in prices since '95-'96, of course they were turned down, being ahead of their time & not americans.
http://www.megalo.co.nz ask for jeremy
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
This thing would use up batteries like there's no tomorrow...especially if the camera was being used continuously for a video call.
... speaking as a consumer I'm going to go out and get the first decent mobile with camera built in. It's going to be great to be able to whip it out at a bar or party when someone decides to make a fool of themselves :-) As for "A person using a phone is doing so to communicate verbally" that simply isn't true in Europe. My friends and I tend to split our usage 50/50 between voice and text messaging. I agree with the picture quality statement though, I want at least 640x480 so I can put the pics up on a web site.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
...to the idea of an obscene phone call.
Can I bum a sig?
This past weekend I saw a demo of Sprint's new 3G technology (CDMA2000 based) in which a 3G enabled camera posted pictures taken up on a distant web server. I was able to access the web server via a laptop with a 3G PC-Card in it. It is stronger than wi-fi (3G is available anywhere a cell phone is) and it is almost as fast as wi-fi.
The Sprint people indicated that the capacity would increase in the year that followed to make 3G a great alternative technology. I espcially liked the idea of broadband to PDA/Phone. Wireless networking isn't supposed to make me excited (I run a wifi for my apartment building) but this demo was done in the middle of a parking lot that was surrounded by fields! Now the people of Lenexa, KS can finally surf the web while driving the combines. Isn't that what technology is about?
More web-surfing and less using it to make the US a police state.
Contrary to some comments to this article, I would say that cameras in mobile phones is an absolute lifestyle MUST-HAVE.
...
... check this out!" [pans camera]
..." [sound of jaw dropping]
... I wouldn't call that dressed, exactly."
... I've got to get one of these ...
I mean, it's one thing hanging out on a beach on Ko Tao and just *calling* your friends back home in the drizzle - you only get to tell them how nice it is.
But if you can give them a vidio-pan of your surroundings at the same time, the whole undertaking acquires an actual point
"Bert
Bert: "Uh
"Wait! Who was that?!"
"Oh, just the beach bunnies who bring the drinks. They're always dressed like that."
Bert: "Uh
"Anyway, I just wanted to say that I'm having a great time, and that I wish you could be here too."
Bert: "You got that bloody right, mate."
Yes
yes, we have no bananas
The Israeli's can do anything cheaper, because
the U.S. has already paid for it twice over.
U.S. direct financial aid to Israel is over $US14,000
per capita per annum (and total costs to the US
of aid per Israeli citizen including debt interest
come to over $21,000). Most companies in Isreal
don't even need to make a profit, because the
handouts from the state make Asian crony capitalism
look like a model of purity and virtue.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Comes from Israel, damn cheap jews ...
*rimshot*
I kid, I kid! A little John Stewart humor there for ya
Even after reading the comments and the story and a other stories just like this, I don't understand why I want a camera on my cellphone, and also since I pay for data access by the meg, I dunno if I wanna pay for one either. Now, the camera on the palm is a good idea, but id rather just have a digital camera with a microdrive.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
This seems like it would be much more entertaining... I've always wanted to attach position fixes to my photos. Think of the possibilities! Your photo albums could then have a map interface where you could click on all of your vacation spots to call up the pictures you took from there.
:)
Better yet, everyone could upload to a big photo database somewhere. Then if you wanted pictures of the grand canyon, you could go to the site and call of every picture people took on archive.
It would probably be pretty easy to do this now if you simply kept a GPS log of your travels and correlated the positions with the timestamps on your camera pictures. Any projects to do anything like this yet?
Slave labour makes everything cheaper.
Think it's possible to get an XM radio reveiver into a cell phone? That would be a nice combo.
so with auto answer on your phone it would pick up and whom ever is on the other end can see what your doing...say the phone was on the night stand when yer a bit busy with sex or in the bathroom with ya on the John...ewwww...no thanks...
what if it has auto call back..unnghh...
Hey heres a thought...are they going to make cameras that go through your retinas so the voices in your head have sight too? (refering to the last cell phone article about inserting a cell phone device in teeth)
-Alicia
I have vague memories of the human body being able to act like a decent antenna (e.g, holding onto a broken-off antenna nub on a radio to improve the reception). Maybe this effect is only for certain frequency ranges? Perhaps the implanted stuff can use this effect to get decent reception w/o requiring long implanted wires or extensive subdermal shielding.
If you want a mobile webcam that works on CDPD today, check this out.
It blocks light and protects the lens!
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
By talking on your cell phone while driving down the freeway and cutting me off. The next driver that does this I swear I'm gonna go buy a fucking beater car and clip the rear end of their $40,000 SUV and make them go careening into the semi on my other side that they are squishing me into in my little hatchback.
:)
:sigh: I'm sure this rant will fall on deaf ears though
Yes, you too can have a digital camera in your hand that can take pictures of the inside of your ear, while talking to your mistress on the way home from your business trip
WHY DO YOU NEED A FUCKING DIGITAL CAMERA IN YOUR GOD DAMN CELL PHONE?!?!?! Why do you need to have anything other than a cell phone, I don't want to be available everywhere. And I especially don't want a cell phone that has a digital camera in it. What happens when the camera portion of it breaks? now you have a regular cell phone again, or the cell phone breaks, now you have a high priced dinky little piece of shit digital camera.
Come on, there is a time when things get ridiculously lame and complicated.
Yhcrana
The voices in my head don't like you
Now people can talk on their phone while driving *AND* take a picture of me flipping them off for doing so!
No sig for you!!
What kind of phone call would require a real-time view of your rear?
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
15$ Is too much for you, I'll give you 12.50$ no less. What are you trying to bankrupt me or something? I have a wife and kids!
:)
Hey it's OK I am jewish! Don't kill me
I'm waiting for the combo phone/PDA/camera like the globals on Earth Final Conflict. I keep wondering why no one has copied the design. The fold out screen is better than any PDA I've seen (from a protection standpoint), and this article shows how cameras can be integrated into cell phones. We've got to be pretty close to someone putting them together into a, slightly larger than normal, integrated package. Will it take an alien invasion for such a cool design to come about?
Here are pictures from last year's J-Phone model. Here are pictures from my newest AU-Casio phone. ($80 with one year contract) And Here's are pictures of some other cell phone features
Note: My AU-Casio phone now has 12.8 meg of memory and can take 640x480 pictures. I'd say by next year the phones will be equal to the low end digital camera market. Low-end meaning like a Sony DSC-P1 (not those toy Yahoo cameras).
The big thing in Japan through J-Phone is not video conferencing it's video e-mail. Take a short 5 or 10 second video of you blowing a kiss to your girlfriend and e-mail it from your phone to her's. I'm not sure how popular sending this video e-mail is but sending just still pictures is huge.