Aah! I made something similar to this near the end of my PhD!
Rather than having an aperture in front of the imaging plane, I elected to place a controllable aperture at the imaging plane. Then, by selectively placing an aperture or pattern you can 'search' for a light source of interest and 'tune out' background light from the rest of the scene.
The application was for optical wireless communications (free space - like having a room luminary be modulated and picking it up from a phone). I was trying to maximise the SNR of a link with a 'solid angle filter'. The end goal was to try and make it work to filter out the sun (with the help of some optical filters too).
I also used a LCD however for my application it was surprisingly hard to find ones that worked well (in terms of having a high contrast ratio with a small enough pixel pitch) for the wavelength I was using. My links were at 405nm (which was selected as it's 'sufficiently dark' in the ASTM solar spectrum).
I ended up looking at resin 3D printers - as they also use 405nm light to cure prints. There are application-specific displays such as DXQ 608-X04 which was the one I used. They also require very high resolution for high-quality prints, which is a nice bonus.
The whole thing was really interesting but ultimately I never ended up writing it up into papers - just in my thesis. I borrowed a lot of what I learned from the single-pixel camera papers out there, lots of coded-aperture work! I never got to the point of properly 'imaging' a scene with coded apertures (as I had a single high-speed detector) but it's definitely something that's possible.
I had the absolute pleasure during my engineering undergraduate (Oxford) to take a biomedical module. One of my 'labs' was on nonlinear acoustics, specifically ultrasound applied for therapeutic uses. It was very captivating seeing a very focused point within a block of gel become ablated. A part I found particularly exciting was realising that it was a phased array of ultrasonic emitters, so that the point where the ablation occurred could in fact be placed anywhere you desired in the gel.
They showed us results of HIFU applied to real patients to non-invasively ablate tumours and treat prostate issues. As far as I can tell the probe creating the ultrasonic waves needs to be relatively close.
A thought I had at the time was if you knew all of the material properties of all of the tissues inside someone and their locations (say with an MRI) you could in theory apply this even deeper in someone than is currently possible - with a larger stick-on patch of actuators as a phased array.
Finally, another memorable thing that was discussed was what another researcher was doing with ultrasonics.
Stride (who I am delighted to say was a fantastic lecturer) was very interested in bubbles. She would construct tiny bubbles where the surface (or interior?) was made of a chemotherapy drug. These bubbles could then be injected into someone's blood stream and would be ruptured using ultrasound to allow for extremely targeted application of chemotherapy (the jet formed from rupture would be so strong it would inject the drug into nearby tissue).
Fascinating, fascinating stuff but of course developed over many years of hard work.
It also drives home the serendipity of science. One can easily pander a researcher spending their days thinking about bubbles from a place of ignorance. Yet this is what basic research often looks like—play.
As someone who has worked on bubbles from a bioengineering/synthetic biology perspective, it is definitely play at some level. Like “what happens if we freeze dry them?” And of course determining which extremely specific kind works best for whatever application, etc.
The example that I saw was of a patient whose prostate had swollen closing up the urethra. HIFU was applied to ablate the urethra which “opened it back up” so that fluids could pass through again un-impeded. As a consequence the patient could then live a normal life.
"Ablation (Latin: ablatio – removal) is the removal or destruction of something from an object by vaporization, chipping, erosive processes, or by other means."
It's quite rare that art grabs me, but this did. I love the idea of bending photographic truth in real-time, especially with an optical device.
I find the Fulgurator a bit subversive and also unsettling, how much in a photo is manipulated at point-of-capture?
I think another way this gets me thinking is that we generally assume that sensors are 'neutral' witnesses, but that's more of a comforting illusion rather than fact. The fulgurator shows manipulation at a physical level, but it's not hard to imagine similar interventions happening at firmware or even silicon.
Outside of finance, I generally find UK software and hardware comp to be abysmal. Especially when contrasted to the US, and even Germany.
For reference, I hold a doctorate in Engineering and a Class 1 MEng both at Oxford. I was offered £40k to work as an engineer in my niche (photonics).
My lab partner who went to Germany sits on a ~€90k salary doing similar to what I would have done.
Due to the limitations of hardware career options in London, I opted for software engineering post-DPhil, but I ended up earning £42k. After two years of work, I am sitting on £52k. I don't regard myself as an "under achiever", I own a significant proportion of the product I work on and am a top contributor.
I don't think that level of comp is appropriate given the amount of work I put myself through / how much I contribute, and I think it's reflective of the UK as a whole.
Not being sure that your brand new invention will even be useful, and therefore not bothering to think about international politics while inventing packet switched networking is now “American exceptionalism”? That’s just absurd.
I was always led to believe that the primary source of radiation we need to worry about for space travel was Cosmic Radiation [1]. The shielding requirements for CR relative to solar radiation requires much more material, to protect from rays from every angle.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/analog-field-testing/why-space...
What? The chunnel cost £26 billion in (2023 equivalent), and is 31 miles long. That's nearly a billion a mile. This is by no means cheap (yes yes cheap is a comparative term), tunnelling is absurdly expensive and not realistic.
It's impossible to make the case for thousands of miles of underground tunnels that will add no benefit (what happens when something goes wrong? you can't simply overtake when something inevitably goes wrong (three train derailments per day in the US), it's underground so it's hard to access / fix problems etc etc.
It's a foolish, expensive idea, when the US struggles to take care of it's own railway systems.
Luckily enough I have just finished my PhD on optical wireless receivers. While it is truly fascinating, I think it's fundamentally over-hyped as a technology and I doubt it'll ever replace conventional RF communications.
I have issues with 802.11bb - I feel like the old guard of ex-RF engineers are trying to force OFDM as the technology to be used, when it realistically makes more sense to use OOK as it is operating at baseband (some members of the board have even published papers showing that it shouldn't use OFDM!). Overall it feels like a political statement of saying "we now have OWC standards!" when the technology is fundamentally flawed and likely will never materialise for end users.
Rather than having an aperture in front of the imaging plane, I elected to place a controllable aperture at the imaging plane. Then, by selectively placing an aperture or pattern you can 'search' for a light source of interest and 'tune out' background light from the rest of the scene.
The application was for optical wireless communications (free space - like having a room luminary be modulated and picking it up from a phone). I was trying to maximise the SNR of a link with a 'solid angle filter'. The end goal was to try and make it work to filter out the sun (with the help of some optical filters too).
I also used a LCD however for my application it was surprisingly hard to find ones that worked well (in terms of having a high contrast ratio with a small enough pixel pitch) for the wavelength I was using. My links were at 405nm (which was selected as it's 'sufficiently dark' in the ASTM solar spectrum).
I ended up looking at resin 3D printers - as they also use 405nm light to cure prints. There are application-specific displays such as DXQ 608-X04 which was the one I used. They also require very high resolution for high-quality prints, which is a nice bonus.
The whole thing was really interesting but ultimately I never ended up writing it up into papers - just in my thesis. I borrowed a lot of what I learned from the single-pixel camera papers out there, lots of coded-aperture work! I never got to the point of properly 'imaging' a scene with coded apertures (as I had a single high-speed detector) but it's definitely something that's possible.