On one screen, a normal street scene plays out in downtown Sydney. On the other, cars and pedestrians have turned into ghosts. The background is dark and indistinct, with only spectral outlines of movement shown.
The second feed is the world viewed through a neuromorphic “event camera” demonstrated at the Neuroware Centre at University College London (UCL) in January. Neuromorphic computing is inspired more by biology than mathematics, designed to mimic how a human brain computes. It uses bursts of electrical activity modelled on neurons, acting only when input data changes rather than constantly processing full data streams, and consuming a fraction of the power and bandwidth. The human brain uses only 20 watts of electricity, the power of a dim lightbulb.
“You’ve compressed this cluttered scene that was megabytes of data to kilobytes, and you’ve extracted the things that are important,” says Tony Kenyon, professor of nanoelectronic and nanophotonic materials at UCL and director of the Neuroware Centre.