Before you start reading this, I would like to ask you to close your eyes for 10 seconds. Please do this now.
It’s tough, right? We really need our eyes and are pretty powerless without them. The first thing we do when we wake up in the morning is to open then, and the last thing we do in the evening when we go to sleep is to close them.
The history of our eyes started 270 million years ago. The Trilobite was the first species that developed this compelling new sensing mechanism: the power of sight. It turned out to be very potent. Using the power of sight, it was easier for the Trilobite to search for food, keep an eye on its family, and flee from predators. This new sense was possibly one of the driving forces behind the Cambrian Explosion, a period in which many new species originated in a relatively short period of time.
We are now on the eve of a new revolution in which our electronics will also adopt the power of sight. A large part of this new sensing component has already been widely adopted by our electronics in the form of their cameras. At home in my family of five, I count about thirty. Two cameras per mobile phone and tablet; one in each laptop; we also have a few digital still cameras; and then there are some cameras gathering dust as part of our old cell phones that haven’t yet been recycled.
