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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

The event camera has no frame rate, essentially. Each photon sensor fires asynchronously. You should look into some of the applications of event cameras, they’re near magical for some things like high velocity movements and such. They have other problems though, not least of which is inaccessibility.

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But wouldn't the frame rate be limited by the complexity of the scene, and the available bandwidth? What happens when buffers start to overflow?

Imagine instead of getting a grid of pixels once every 30th of a second, you instead get one pixel’s value, alone with its location, along with the time stamp at which the pixel’s change was noticed. Event cameras can have very fine time stamp resolution (orders of magnitude better than 1/30th of a second) and so a bright moving pixel can be tracked very accurately.

When you explain it like that, existing camera technology looks like the stupidest, most inefficient way to do things possible.

This seems like one of those "obvious in hindsight" discoveries, which are always the best ones.

Well, digital camera technology for video is a pretty cheap extension of pre-existing digital camera technology for still photography. And capturing whole individual frames (or successive scanlines) is also a good fit for most display technologies.

It's only really in the context of computer vision and object tracking that the brute force whole-frames model starts to seem less than convenient.

And VR?

But with enough depth (bits), almost every pixel will be changing at high frequency due to small light variations.

Which probably indicates some algorithmic way the chip determines true, non-light based change.

Yet, this also means the possibility of some missed changes, of some changes being taken as lighting changes, instead of object change.

Was that a cloud, or a large shape close to the lens?

Hmm. Gonna have to read on this.

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