December 5, 2006
Honda may build tiny cameras into its cars’ wing mirrors, reports New Scientist.
These “car cams” would look at the road both ahead and behind and use cellphone connections to send real time video back to a central server. Each car would also transmit its GPS location and speed, allowing the central server to build a collection of road views and traffic information, integrated into a digital map of the area. Honda envisages a free access scheme, allowing any participating driver to use a home computer or an in-car navigation device to click on a map and view real-time road conditions and details of car speeds. Fixed cameras by the roadside could supplement the data.
For privacy, Honda suggests that all video footage would be supplied anonymously, and that all cameras would automatically switch off whenever the GPS device detects that it is close to the driver’s home or office.
New CMOS imager chips are emerging that directly sense depth—3D pixel-by-pixel, says EE Times today.
Current automotive systems calculate distance, such as those that warn drivers of obstacle behind them as they back up, by using ultrasonic sensors. More sophisticated—expensive—sensors are under development using radar and lidar, but companies worldwide are trying to find cheaper ways to use cameras to calculate distance.
“Cameras are becoming so inexpensive that everybody in the business is trying to use them instead of more expensive ultrasonic, lidar and radar sensors,” said David Alexander, senior analyst at ABI Research.
“We already have 2D cameras which are used to provide lane-departure warnings—the camera looks out the front and tracks the dotted line. A new application might be pre-crash sensing that calculates that a crash is imminent and pre-charged the brakes as well as fires the air bags more quickly than when waiting for the crash to happen.”
One of the most promising approaches has been honed by Canesta (above). Canesta’s CMOS image chip (below), detects the distance to every object in a scene simultaneously, as opposed to ultrasonic which only senses distance to the nearest objects”, said Alexander.
“One of the things that distinguishes Canesta is its Sunshield technology that solves one of the hardest problems of using a camera—that is it must be able to work in varying light situations to be safe enough to deploy in consumer automobiles… but they still have a ways to go to crack all these different automotive applications. I believe that it will be the 2008 and 2009 models in which we will see the first Canesta’s 3D camera in consumer vehicles.”
Other companies are also experimenting with making CMOS image chips that detect depth on a pixel-by-pixel basis, notably International Electronics & Engineering (Luxemburg, Germany). Another company, Mobileye (Southfield, Mich.), using a normal 2D camera with their CMOS hardware accelerator chip.
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unmediated.av:
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drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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