Super Vision Chip Scans 200 Page Book In 60 Seconds; Has Natal-Style Gaming Potential [Video]

After speculation earlier today about the lag involved in Sony's PlayStation Move system, how about a really fast camera?  University of Tokyo professor Masatoshi Ishikawa has developed the simply-titled "Super Vision Chip", capable of scanning an entire 200 page book in a minute (you can see the demo after the cut).  While obviously that would make digitizing documents more straightforward, Ishikawa reckons the system also has potential in gaming.Video demo after the cut

The camera used can operate at 500fps, and captures frames at 1280 x 1024 resolution.  As the video below demonstrates, you can flick idly through the book – faster than you can read each individual page, certainly – and the camera will grab a stable shot of everything along the way.  A combination of regular light and laser light is used; the system can track the laser patterns and use them to adjust the images for any skew or 3D deformation.

Ishikawa has already used the Super Vision Chip in robotics – he's created robot arms capable of tracking and catching objects moving at high speed, or bouncing balls off of walls without dropping them – and his team are working on increasing performance so you can flip the book even faster.  The eventual hope is to have a camera system small enough to fit into a mobile device, so you could theoretically do all this with your iPhone.

[via BoingBoing]