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They say the best cameras ever are our eyes. But they're not cameras! We can't print or go back to view a picture or two. Engineers at the Swiss company iniLabs have created a camera that borrows its mechanics from the human retina. How close does this come?

The Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) works a lot like the human retina. It is hyper efficient and ultrafast. the individual neurons in our eyeballs don't record all the information in our field of view, so all they do is spot the changes in movement, getting rid of extraneous data from the surrounding. The DVS works this way, by selectively recording only the motion, it can record hours of video using very little power and a few megabytes of storage.

The chips that power the DVS are from IBM's line of brain inspired chips from the TrueNorth computer architecture.
"What we’re talking about—the cameras sending information when something changes—is actually a very central theme to how the brain works, or at least how neuroscientists think it works," Cornell computer scientist Nabil Imam told the Technology Review. "We're capturing brain features at a high level."
[Technology Review]