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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Depending on how good the specm is, just about as many uses as a camera. What's this leaf? Whats this red stuff? What kinda soil and I standing on? What is the air pollution like today? Is this bleach? Is that really gold? What is this IC made of? What is my baby's heart rate, does she have the flu? What grade of steel is this wrench? How old is this picture of gram? How new is this gasket? Is this chicken what I have, or fish (from the lips of Mrs. Lachey (nee Simpson) herself)?

It's mostly what questions as to materials, depending on how good the specm is. Combine this with your phone's camera for other optical measurements (IR, size, shape, position, etc), some gps data, maybe some tracking of your amazon history, and you have a device that might be able to tell you what anything ever seen is to reasonable certainty. There is without any doubt, a large market for that.

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Depending on how good the specm is...

The article says that besides being small it's also high bandwidth and high resolution. Not sure how many distinct things you can identify based on spectral analysis alone, but I have high hopes for one day owning a Tricorder like device. Being able to fingerprint and identify real world stuff we might ingest seems huge, am I drinking Coke or Diet Coke? Vodka or Gin?

> am I drinking Coke or Diet Coke? Vodka or Gin?

Society didn't take MyVessyl.com really well.

Your friends might roll their eyes at you putting Soylent in your Vessyl and monitoring your daily caloric intake on your Apple Watch either, but nerds want what they want.

I could see this being a huge boon for Augmented Reality applications. It's frankly quite exciting. I'm kind of jittering right now. Imagine how difficult it would be for an application to determine the difference between a real person and a suitably detailed mannequin. The human might be able to tell, but the application wouldn't. But test the "skin" of the form and it will know, and then know different overlays to apply.

Oh man oh man oh man.

Human -> facial recognition -> overlay Twitter feed.

Mannequin -> check for NFC tags -> show product details + highlight sales.

Banana -> ask the user if they're going to eat it -> add to daily calorie intake.

Generic plate of food -> estimate density of individual ingredients based on image coverage -> save the world from heart disease!

I'm dead serious, how soon can we get this in a device? I have work to do.

I think you'll still need to carefully prepare the samples.

Yeah, I started trying to research how this could be done and realized this :(

Still feels like there is something there. I mean, can't we consider a photo a type of spectrograph, just for only a few, very broad bandgaps of light? Perhaps we can spend some of a modern, high-resolution CCD's spatial resolution on wavelength resolution. With high-magnification lenses, you'd then be able to spot-check an area of a certain material from across a room. You'd not be able to do the entire room in one shot, but you'd be able to scan a room. Combine it with photogrammetry methods to process a roving needle as a user walks into a room, looks around, etc.

Neural networks would certainly benefit from the additional dimension, no more confusing furniture with animals[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749660

Yeah, it kinda acts as a proxy for 'touching' something. OUr finger get a lot of info from the surface texture, resonances in the material, tensile strength, etc. that a computer just can't have yet. A good specm could help fill in a bit of that data set.

Could it be used to test if drugs are the genuine stuff?

That would be a great use case. And really, not even for the illegal stuff either. Is this an M&M or advil? How much and what isomer of caffeine is in this drink? Is there shellfish in this? Is that poison ivy?

I mean, really simple stuff for anyone to get hurt with chemically, things like this can help with. Maybe not the full functionality like we see on star trek. But, I'm sure people with allergies, ravers with molly, moms that want to know what is safe for their babies, etc can all have something that can help mitigate risk in some small way.

The right way to do that would be with FTIR or Raman spectroscopy, and this sensor is capable of neither.

At best, this is an ersatz replacement for the tunable filter on a hyperspectral imaging system. There are some advantages (off hand, acquisition rate is a big one) to a more diverse mosaic filter, but other than in using QDs as the actual filter medium, this idea is not at all new.

Meh, it's a use case scenario. When the differences in the materials you are testing for are so large, the sensor can make a pretty good bet for you. Take the case of; Is this Tylenol or a Skittle. Acetaminophen and fructose are very different and you can test for that pretty simply. To get very accurate readings you need a much more powerful pulse laser as the source, ture, but mose people don't need that. You can get 80% of the use cases with 20% of the 'tech', I think that's a great reason to stick one in every phone you can.

I'm not a big FTIR person, but at least for Raman, laser power is far less important than the linewidth (and you definitely don't need a pulsed laser) and the rest of the optical engine. I'm actually pretty bearish across the board on these consumer spectroscopy products mostly due to the importance of sample prep. Your use case statement is correct, distinguishing paracetamol from candy should be easy, but is really that a common need or a novelty? It seems to be the latter to me.

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