Project Chimera, and what cheap cameras are changing
A brief to design the most cost-effective home security camera took our research a long way past the front door.
Project Chimera began with Greenware Systems, a home security agency that funded the work: find out how to build the most cost-effective security camera we could, hardware and software together. They were the two heads of the beast that gave the project its name. Between December 2022 and June 2023 we went back to first principles.
A few findings stayed with us. A depth sensor as capable as Sony’s IMX611 now samples for around US$7 to 8. Billions of camera modules ship every year, and cars, not phones, are pushing what they can do. Custom silicon, image processors paired with neural engines, has become a necessity rather than a selling point. And software is learning to infer depth from a single ordinary camera, turning a sensor into an algorithm.
Put together, they point somewhere bigger than home security. The camera is turning from a way to keep a moment into an always-on sensor that lets machines understand a space, and video is becoming part of the world’s information infrastructure.
Karthik’s notes from the research, charts included, are on his blog: Notes from camera sensor research.