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Researchers at Rice University are currently working on a single-pixel camera, designed to correct the inefficiencies of modern digital cameras.

I’ve written about the Megapixel Myth before, but you’ve got to be thinking that a solitary pixel is a tad small. A recent BBC article provides an explanation of the project:

Instead of taking the light from an object through a lens and focusing it on a pixel array, we actually reflect it off an array of mirrors. This digital micromirror device, as it is known, consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium. From that mirror array, we then focus the light through a second lens on to one single photo-detector - a single pixel.

As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession. Complex mathematics then interprets the signals assembling a high resolution image from the thousands of sequential single-pixel snapshots.

(found via SCI FI Blog)