Taking it All In

The more you perceive, the more you know. What if you could see more than what’s visible? Adding sensors for modalities beyond vision opens up new opportunities, from personal devices to scientific discovery.

Adding a barometer, accelerometer, compass and gyroscope to the new iPhone 6 means that in addition to being able to sense light, touch, proximity, and orientation, your phone can now tell you what elevation you’ve climbed to, which direction you’re facing, how you’re moving and when you’re in your car. For the Mars Rover to make the most out of it’s interplanetary journey of discovery, scientists and engineers endowed it with sensors like the Rover Environmental Monitoring system that allowed it to detect meteorological conditions and ultraviolet radiation, and the Radiation Assessment Detector that detects and assesses radiation levels – a tool that has been key to determining the risks of sending a manned mission to the planet.

In a position to explore

“Taking digital imaging beyond the sense of sight is the future of imaging innovation,”says Gareth Ingram, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Digital Imaging at Teledyne DALSA, “We’re used to having our 5 senses as we call them, and we feel a loss if we can’t see or we can’t hear, taste, touch”, says Gareth, “We’re accustomed to having the ability to really sense the environment around us.”

Gareth has been working in Teledyne DALSA’s digital imaging sector for more than 19 years, a career that has kept him at the forefront of the evolution of imaging technology. He sees the potential for devices like the smart camera to become uber-sensing devices, taking advantage of an entire host of sensing capabilities. Teledyne’s testing facilities and MEMs Foundry provide a framework for considering new directions, and making these leaps in sensor abilities possible. “We can make accelerometers, we can detect sound, we can detect magnetic fields, polarizations, imagine what you can do with those.”