Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.19
The redesigned optical mouse chip with testability features was featured—via Charles
Bragg's 1966 painting
Salute
—on the cover of
VLSI Design
magazine in 1982 [
26
]. The caption
reads “There are times when your mouse must be able to see. A single chip may be the solution.”
Mead and his students with a wide range of neuromorphic vision and hearing chips.
The mouse design influenced the development of some of their silicon retina ideas,
such as motion sensing chips [
35
], and the winner-take-all and the address-event
schemes for sparse digitization of analog signals [
21
,
27
], as well as silicon cochlea
chips [
23
,
37
]. Researchers elsewhere took the ideas in different directions, such as
a60
60 binary smart imager in CMOS [
15
].
The small size of the optical, as opposed to mechanical, motion sensor allowed
researchers to experiment with other configurations, such as following up the sug-
gestion in my original report that “a pen-like device with a big base that keeps it
from falling over might be desirable” [
6
]; and a 93-pixel analog motion tracker chip
developed for the Logitech Marble [
2
], a trackball version of my suggested “device
that watches a golfball-like pattern of dots on a rolling ball.”
The optical mouse implements a simple version of what in modern vision sys-
tems is called
visual odometry
—essentially, a notion of self tracking by imaging
the environment. Gary Bishop credited the inspiration for his 1984 “self-tracker”
invention this way [
5
]: “The inspiration for this research came from Leandra Vicci
of the UNC Computer Science Microelectronic Systems Laboratory, who suggested
that we could track in three dimensions using something similar to Richard Lyon's
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