An IEEE Spectrum article describes a new optical fiber technology that can be used to gather an image.
"Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a polymer fiber that can detect the angle, intensity, phase, and wavelength of light hitting it, information that can be used to re-create a picture of an object without a lens."
This very low cost, low infrastructure required approach could find its way into all kinds of sensing applications. Examples include recognizing the amount of dirt in the air or dust on a device.
Yoel Fink, Director of MIT's Photonic Bandgap Fibers and Devices Group, says in an interview, "Our goal is to achieve a very high level of sophisticated functionality in a fiber, similar to semiconductor devices but using fiber-draw techniques."
The range of possibilities to place functionality into the fiber itself combined with ever increasing sensing and computing capability will impact business in some exciting ways.
