How Did Tiny Cameras Change Our World Forever?

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]A single image or a single video can change the world. And that's using just one camera image sensor. In the last 15 years, over 75 billion camera sensors have been produced and have found their way into everything from doorbells to drones, phones to toys, satellites to cars, pill cameras to moon missions, and almost everything else in between. They truly have given vision to what was once blind.

[00:00:35]All the world has become a stage with everyone, young and old, becoming accidental actors recorded or broadcast with or without their consent. Lowcost image sensors have created the tick tock generation. millions of cat videos, brought the word selfie into everyday use, made YouTube the largest broadcast network in the world where anyone can be a star, changed the face of news as we see it, and the way in which we communicate personally. Roughly 43.2 million minutes of video are uploaded to YouTube every day. And if you were to watch just one day's worth of uploads for 24 hours a day, it would take just over 82 years, literally a lifetime. And almost all of that was recorded with a CMOS camera sensor of some sort. Just imagine if these tiny cameras on a chip had not been invented and we only had the cathode ray tube cameras from up to the 1970s.

[00:01:37]none of the previous things I've mentioned would have happened and the world would be a very different place.

[00:01:44]This one piece of technology is a massive enabler and has had a profound effect on humanity, much of it for good.

[00:01:52]But as with anything man-made, it can also be used for far more sinister uses, which we'll see later on. But if we've had cameras for much longer than the modern tech around us, why are they having such an impact in the last few years? Although the modern CMOS camera on a chip was first developed in 1993 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory by Dr. Eric Fosam and his team, it took years before it would find its way onto a device that could be carried by everyone all of the time, namely a mobile phone.

[00:02:26]Up until when cameras with CMOS sensors had become quite commonplace and with reasonably good quality, cameras, be that for photographic stills or video cameras, were singlepurpose devices.

[00:02:38]They did one job and often they were bulky with lenses and camera bags and you had to make a conscious decision to take one with you wherever you went if you were going to use it. Unless you were a very keen photographer or part of a news crew, the chances of the average person having one of these with them when something interesting or dramatic happened was really very low. Even if you did have a camera on hand, it would probably have been a film camera, great quality, but you had to take the film out, get it processed, and eventually get your photographs back in a few days.

[00:03:16]Unless, of course, you develop them yourself. then scan the negatives or the photos before you could upload the digital version. Nothing was immediate.

[00:03:25]There was no way to snap an image or take a video and upload it to the world to see it within minutes of it being made. Video was equally awkward because the video cameras recorded to tape and even if it was a digital format, you still had to convert it to something like WMV, AVI, Mauv, or MPG format to upload to the early YouTube of the late 2000s. Live streaming was for professionals only and involved satellite links and a van full of broadcast equipment. For the likes of you and me, there was nothing that we could do to compete with that. The revolution that would bring about what we have today started in Japan when the first mass market phone camera arrived with the Sharp J4 launched on the 1st of November 2000 with a 0.11 megapixel camera. That was a pretty lowspec camera even back then.

[00:04:22]When it was exclusively launched in Japan, it revolutionized the mobile industry by integrating photography directly into a personal communications device. For the first time, you had a camera on a device you carried with you all the time, your mobile phone. And although the image quality was pretty basic compared to today, it proved the concept work and the development of new camera phones rapidly increased. In 2002, camera phones were still largely a Japanese and South Korean phenomenon, but growing fast. It's estimated that 10 million embedded camera phones were sold in the first 9 months of 2002, but the high cost was still limiting demand outside of the Far East. By 2004, the CMOS image sensors had become cheap enough for serious mass adoption. And from 2007 where their inclusion into the first iPhone by 2011 they had become truly normal everywhere and the die was cast. Now this episode sponsor is me.

[00:05:27]I've mentioned occasionally that I'm a bit of a synth head and I've been into electronic music since I was 12 way back in 1974.

[00:05:35]That was the year that Tangerine Dream released Fedra, Craft Work released Autobarn, and I ta released Snowflakes of Dancing. Three landmark electronic albums from pioneering musicians that had a huge influence on me and millions of others. But it was Tamita's work which really fascinated me. Over nine albums from 1974 to 1984. He took classical works by composers like Dusi Rorski, Stravinsky, Holst and many others and recreated them electronically using synthesizers such as the Mog Modell. This was similar in concept to Wendy Carlos's Switched on Bark, but Tamita's music was more colorful, surreal, and flamboyant. Back then I knew almost nothing about classical music. The sounds Tamita created were completely new to me and everybody else.

[00:06:27]That combination of classical composition and strange, beautiful, otherworldly electronic sounds was utterly fascinating. It followed the original scores, but somehow sounded like nothing else. Since 1998 on and off, I've been making electronic music inspired by that same approach. I'm not covering the same pieces Tita did, but reworking other works by some of those composers using a mixture of hardware and software synthesizers. Last year, I finally had an album's worth of material I felt was good enough to release, and that's what I'm promoting today. As I've been speaking, you've been hearing snippets of the music from the album.

[00:07:08]It's made very much in this style.

[00:07:10]classical pieces reimagined through synthesis with bright, strange, colorful sounds and a very deliberately electronic character. So, if you're a fan of Tomita style of music or you're into the more eclectic electronic music, you can hear the whole thing for free on my Band Camp page, porchtomusic.bandamp.com.

[00:07:31]Link is in the top description below. If you enjoy it, you can purchase the album or individual tracks for the price of a coffee or two. helps support the channel and it helps keep this slightly unusual corner of electronic music alive and there'll be more on the way soon.

[00:07:54]Smartphones made the camera not just a feature but a core part of communication, social media, and identity. If something happened, you had the device to record it right there in your pocket and send it to anyone on the internet, even if the connection speeds of the time often left a lot to be desired and mobile data costs were a small fortune, especially if you were abroad. By 2011, camera phone sales were forecast to exceed 1 billion units per year for the first time. As mobile networks improved in the early 2010s with 4G speeds, video could be streamed in quality that rivaled HD TV. Greater quality and its ease of access drove the use of video even more and platforms like YouTube and Facebook started offering live streaming. Firstly with YouTube live in 2011 and then Facebook in 2015.

[00:08:51]Now, everyday people could broadcast or stream video from anywhere to a mass market, something which was only available to professional organizations before. But it wasn't only social media which was making use of the higher camera resolutions. By 2011, mobile phones were still the dominant volume driver and accounted for more than 75% of CMOS sensor shipments for that year.

[00:09:18]But that scale made sensors cheaper, smaller, and better for everyone else, too. Take the security industry. They had used cameras since the vacuum tube days. But with a new wave of small, low power, and increasingly sensitive SEMOS sensors, surveillance systems boomed, and the signals were now digital and not limited to the old VHS tape recordings of analog systems.

[00:09:46]This meant that they could be part of much larger networks of cameras. Think of the Ring doorbell camera as a popular example. If you have one, you know that they continuously watch day and night, capturing every movement and every visitor, alerting you if someone or thing approached where it is placed, even using built-in AI to recognize known faces. Once triggered, they can not only stream the video to your phone, but they also can upload it automatically to a remote data farm for viewing later. That video might well be yours, but it's also now on Amazon servers and through legal requests or court orders. It can be accessed by law enforcement agencies in the case of a serious crime in the area and suspects might have been caught on the camera passing by but still triggering the recording. But that's just a simple application. Networks of CCTV cameras now merges the ubiquity of the camera sensor with the power of high-speed networking and advanced AI to recognize people just going about their daily business, walking down the street or driving in their car in any town or city. Facial recognition can check almost every facing view against a watch list of wanted suspects, people with court orders or wanted for serious offenses, missing persons, or people banned from certain places. Using fixed or temporary surveillance cameras, large crowds of people can be watched and analyzed by AI for movement and behavior. People walking in a town or city can be tracked across a wide area and even moving from one city to another. New traffic cameras can not only check the speed and type of vehicle, but also read the number plates on multiple cars at once on multi-lane highways and see if the occupants are wearing a seat belt or talking on a phone. The latest camera technologies have the resolution and optics to do live facial recognition of car occupants now. But so far the authorities in UK for one say that it's not to be used for that yet.

[00:12:00]Tiny cameras have also changed the way in which we see the news almost completely. Major news events are now often first recorded by ordinary people, not journalists. Protests, accidents, disasters, and conflicts can be documented immediately. Where once we just had the state and national broadcasters like the BBC, ABC, CBS, CNN with a limited number of camera crews and reporters, which might be hours or days away from a story. Now, anyone with a smartphone has a camera ready to record or stream a video within moment's notice and push this out to thousands or millions of people around the world via social media.

[00:12:42]Citizen war reporting now shows the true unfiltered face of conflict in a way which has never been seen on the traditional news broadcasts. Despite the attempts by governments to try and block it, people still find ways to view the conflict from other sources around the world. Lowcost commercial drones with tiny cameras were not that long ago mostly the preserve of hobbyists checking out the local surroundings and uploading the results to YouTube. But since the current Ukraine conflict started in 2022, lowcost camera drones have changed warfare forever. What were once seen as toys by many are now not just a means of surveillance, but an active weapon of war, becoming a cross between a sniper rifle against individuals, and an artillery strike against buildings and any type of vehicles, be that stationary or on the move, and even taking out aircraft, helicopters, and other drones.

[00:13:44]Even our cars are now rolling video recorders with dash cams. Originally, they were used as evidence in case of a crash. Now, they are continuously watching everything in front of or behind the car or even around the car, even when it's parked up and turned off in some cases. On the 15th of February 2013, hundreds of dash cams recorded an extremely rare event as a completely unexpected asteroid about 18 m or 60 ft across, weighing approximately 10,000 tons, stre across the morning sky above the southern Eural region of Russia.

[00:14:23]Traveling at 19.2 2 km or 12 m/s. It lit up the sky brighter than the sun before exploding in a meteor air burst over Chelabinsk Oblast at a height of 30 km or 18.6 mi with the explosive blast equivalent to a yield of 4 to 500 kilotons of TNT. That's about 30 times the size of a Hiroshima bomb. It was only down to the hundreds of dash cam videos that were uploaded online that allowed investigators to analyze and work out where it had come from and why we had not seen it before it hit the earth. Spoiler alert, it did the old fighter pilot trick of coming in from the sun. Now, some cars like Teslas use multiple camera sensors, not just as dash cams, but to see all around the car to look at its surroundings and with a lot of AI processing know where it is, identify other vehicles, objects, and people, and to drive the car by itself.

[00:15:24]And that robotic vision development is taking place in advanced humanoid robots. again merging tiny cameras with highquality optics and advanced AI processing to find their way around the world just like we do. Tiny cameras have revolutionized working from home which became required when the CO 19 pandemic forced hundreds of millions of people to stay at home for weeks or months. This has had an ongoing effect and now homework with video meetings has become almost normalized. Though there has been a drive to get everyone back into the office. Now whilst making this video I came across so many ways in which these tiny cameras have affected us that this video could go on for a very long time.

[00:16:13]I've tried to cover what I think are some of the most impactful ways they have changed our lives in just the last 15 years. But I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments if I've left anything out. So, to help wrap this up, let's look at the very smallest camera sensor yet made and how they will affect us now and in the future. Originally for medical examination, the Omni Vision 6948 holds the official Guinness World Record for the smallest commercially available image sensor. The sensor itself measures just over half a millime square and is just 0.2 23 mm long. When it's integrated into its full camera module, it takes up about the same size as a single grain of sand. And it still has a resolution of 200 by 200 pixels at 30 frames a second. According to Omni Vision, it's designed primarily for medical use and is commonly integrated into disposable guide wires, catheters, and endoscopes. It allows doctors and surgeons to navigate the narrowest blood vessels and smallest anatomical structures without the need for large invasive equipment. It can also enable much more outside of medicine. It can give vision to what was once blind. And it's become the eyes of machines small enough to sit on the end of your finger with robotic insects and drones the size of a fly. Although all these things we have seen are amalgamations of various technologies, the one key feature is without these tiny cameras, none of it would have been possible. They have become in a way one of the greatest technological enablers since the invention of the transistor because they open up the world in ways which are increasingly changing all our lives, be that for the better or worse. So, I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did, then please thumbs up, share, and subscribe. And a big thank you goes to all of our patrons for their ongoing support.