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Seeing-Eye Fabric Developed By MIT Researchers

by Warren Riddle on July 9, 2009 at 03:45 PM

Those dang MIT brainiacs. When they're not cracking people up with their erudite pranks and kooky creations, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing something to make the rest of the world feel insignificant and, well, let's just say undereducated. Institute researchers, according to CNet, have created a fabric with intertwining fibers that act as a basic camera.

The fibers, which can discern between two different light frequencies, produce a signal that is then amplified and processed by a computer. In its first successful trial, the process culminated in a smiley face displayed on the fabric, itself. Yoel Fink, one of the researchers, asserted that the groundbreaking design is the first to employ fabric that "can collect images just like a camera but without a lens."

The researchers believe the technology could be instrumental in battlefield scenarios, giving soldiers a 360-degree view of their surroundings. With this new camera suit, we hope to see a thrilling fiber-optic race to create a working invisibility jumpsuit or a functional chameleon cloak. Should MIT win that race, Cal Tech students need to be very worried. [From: CNet, via Slashdot]

Tags: camera, fiber optic, FiberOptic, military, mit, science, top

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