Motion blur is the curse of even the best smartphone cameras, but not for long. At MWC 2023, sensor designer Prophesee partnered with Qualcomm to bring its “event-based” Metavision technology to Snapdragon platforms and, therefore, future smartphones. Farewell, blurry pet photos, unusable sports action shots, and smudged low-light snaps.
Prophesee’s journey began with custom image sensor hardware designed specially to track motion within a scene, and that’s the key to what makes Metavision so promising. The technology doesn’t capture images like a traditional image sensor, instead calculating the direction and amount of motion to produce a map of moving pixels. This is accomplished by tracking when a pixel changes rather than capturing a full image frame-by-frame like a traditional camera.