This cross section shows two rings of light-sensitive semiconductor material in the fiber. The eight thicker parts are electrodes to carry signals.
(Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)And you thought it was a problem when folks went into the locker room toting cell phones with cameras.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh.
"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but without a lens," said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters.
MIT suggested that the technology, if developed further, could give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area.
The technology uses fibers less than a millimeter in diameter, stretched into thin form from a thicker cylinder. Within the fibers are two cylindrical shells of semiconductor material, each connected to the outside world with four built-in metal electrodes.
In a move more likely to appeal to technology historians than coders, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has published the source code of Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), a precursor to the Unix operating system begun as a research project at the university in 1965.
The code is hosted on MIT's Multics Web site. MIT, General Electric, and Bell Labs worked to commercialize it, but Bell--originator of the more influential and still widely used Unix operating system--dropped out in 1969. Honeywell took over GE's computer business, and Honeywell became Bull, which donated the source code at the site, MIT said.
News of the donation was posted Friday at the Multicians site. Bernard Nivelet, a retired Bull director for strategy, engineering, and sales, led the initiative to post the code.
MIT stopped researching Multics in the late 1970s, Bull stopped developing it in 1985, and the last Multics machine was shut down in 2000, MIT said.
Unless you have a Honeywell mainframe handy, it'll be hard to do anything useful with the code. Perhaps some enterprising programmer will write an emulator?
(Via OSNews.)
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