Danny Sullivan

Camera people keep chasing more pixels. I’m increasingly interested in making the pixel itself do more work. a tiny Edinburgh spinout, Singular Photonics, just launched Litavis - a 3.5 × 3.5 mm SPAD sensor where photon processing happens inside the pixel array. it can simultaneously produce: 256×256 photon-counting intensity 64×64 time-stamped photon events picosecond-scale timing in-pixel histograms programmable time gates and the sensor behavior itself is software-configurable. that architecture feels extremely relevant to small robots/drones/wearables. the usual pipeline is basically: photons → huge stream of dumb measurements → move data → wake expensive compute → figure out what mattered but once sensing becomes computational: photons → extract useful temporal structure at the sensor → send only what the rest of the machine needs we talk endlessly about edge AI moving intelligence from cloud → device. I think the next fun migration is: device → sensor. event cameras already hinted at this. SPADs with programmable in-pixel compute could get very weird.