One of the artificial questions I've been pondering a bit is what we will see more of: pixels that capture light (cameras) or pixels that make up displays? For several years my prediction was that soon we'd see more cameras than displays in the world. The reasoning was that displays are relatively large and made to be seen by a human. Cameras are tiny though and have many uses. Cameras don't need humans to look at the images captured, they can simply be stored, or analyzed by an algorithm running on a piece of silicon. Since there's only a little over 6 billion of us to view the screens, soon we'd have more cameras than displays.
Some cell-phones include two cameras, one for video conferencing and one for taking snapshots. These only have one display, which confirmed that I was right. Soon we'll have more cameras than displays.
Still, the other day I saw a very small digital photo frame which cost only 15 euro and was meant to be worn on a key chain. It could hold 30 photos or so and contained a tiny battery. This caused me to think that the cross over point of having more cameras world-wide than displays is quite far away. We'll soon have displays on our credit cards, on the outside of our laptops and perhaps even on our clothes.
Do you think we will ever have more cameras than displays?
January 21, 2008
Display pixels versus capture pixels
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Eventually we may have flexible, organic displays based on either something like e-ink or OLEDs covering not only clothes, but walls and ceilings. They would display real images, but also abstract lighting, user-interfaces, etc. Touch-screen technology will expand onto these, and surround our everyday life. Screens as we know will disappear, only to be integrated into every surface. So I'd predict the opposite: many more display pixels to transform our actual reality into some kind of mood-driven virtual reality, than camera pixels.
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