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Researchers Create Artificial Eye Chip
One of our ever loquacious AC's sent an interesting story over our way. A Researcher at Johns Hopkins has created an artifical eye chip that "has image sensing and object tracking" capabilites. This has been demonstrated in other systems, the key difference here: speed. One chip, rather then different chip sub-systems.
Interesting article. Just the kind that kinda makes me wish I was doing research work. Oh well, need more money first. :)
But this "eye", with its peripheral sense and high definition central vision, would seem to make a good auto-targetting weapon system. You know, like the type normally seen in sci-fi films?
But thanks to the on-chip processing and because it behaves very much like an organic eye element, it would be much faster. The mobile gun could easily make out motion and determine the expected path of the target and aim/fire appropriately. Would make for more deadly sentries.
A more positive use of this would be perhaps for remote vision applications? While it is hardly an eye-replacement, it can serve to be a much better "camera" replacement. Especially if one is using it for flight AI purposes. By being able to determine relative motion and figure out what objects are doing around it, it can make for much higher accuracey self-navigated crafts. (Airlines, remote data gathering drones, etc..)
Of course, I think a cool use would be for use in AI automatons.. a spider-like robot with object detection/reaction built into the optics.. it would behave more realistically since it can sense when something is approaching it and much more quickly. (I doubt this will lead to killer robots though.. they are only as deadly as we make it.. but then again, guess the argument can be that since we are basically copying nature in silicon, we really don't know exactly what it will do past a certain level of complexity, huh?)
But cool.. just wonder when fully self-adaptive neural proccessor technology will mature. But it just might be that like this eye element, there is a much simpler path which won't seem intelligent at first. Who knows, right?
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I can see it now.. Microsoft Eyeball. It will have special video synchronization code so all GUI's other than Windows appear scrambled.
It will work just like regular eyes, except you find you need to blink a lot more often. Sometimes everything will go blue for a second, but MS will blame Viagra.
On a more positive note, maybe MS will FINALLY have some vision.