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MIT Develops Camera-Like Fabric
suraj.sun writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh. 'This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or "fabric," can collect images just like a camera but without a lens,' said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters. MIT suggested that the technology, if developed further, could give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area."
This is a camera not a display. It seems it only reads what is around, it cant display anything to mimic it. To repoduce the image on the suit for camo or whatever you would probably have to interweave the camera fabric with a fabric that can display images, but then youd have to be very careful not to fall into some feedback loop.
A clothing camera was described by science fiction author George Turner in his 1991 novel Brain Child.
Wouldn't do not to reference related work such as the Stanford Camera Array - video here showing the multitude of neat tricks that can be done by processing images from multiple apertures into a single image:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/CameraArray/CameraArray.mp4
The advent of inexpensive digital image sensors has generated great interest in building sensing systems that incorporate large numbers of cameras. At the same time, advances in semiconductor technology have made increasing computing power available for decreasing cost, power, and package size. These trends raise the question - can we use clusters of inexpensive imagers and processors to create virtual cameras that outperform real ones? Can we combine large numbers of conventional images computationally to produce new kinds of images? In an effort to answer these questions, the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory has built an array of 100 CMOS-based cameras.
Multi-camera systems can function in many ways, depending on the arrangement and aiming of the cameras. In particular, if the cameras are packed close together, then the system effectively functions as a single-center-of-projection synthetic camera, which we can configure to provide unprecedented performance along one or more imaging dimensions, such as resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range, depth of field, frame rate, or spectral sensitivity. If the cameras are placed farther apart, then the system functions as a multiple-center-of-projection camera, and the data it captures is called a light field. Of particular interest to us are novel methods for estimating 3D scene geometry from the dense imagery captured by the array, and novel ways to construct multi-perspective panoramas from light fields, whether captured by this array or not. Finally, if the cameras are placed at an intermediate spacing, then the system functions as a single camera with a large synthetic aperture, which allows us to see through partially occluding environments like foliage or crowds. If we augment the array of cameras with an array of video projectors, we can implement a discrete approximation of confocal microscopy, in which objects not lying on a selected plane become both blurry and dark, effectively disappearing. These techniques, which we explore in our CVPR and SIGGRAPH papers (listed below), have potential application in scientific imaging, remote sensing, underwater photography, surveillance, and cinematic special effects.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/
I believe you are referring to this "Cloak [new scientist]", an interesting application seems to also be to project a faux object that isnt there.
Either way there is no need for sampling of the surrounding area, no camera fabric needed.
We had this in the 80s with HyperColor shirts. Drop a stencil on the shirt and leave it in the sun and the design would be duplicated on the shirt. Hey! It's photosensitive!