Columbia Scientists Invent a Camera That Powers Itself — No Battery Necessary

Have you ever pulled out your camera or smartphone to take a photo, only to find that your device has run out of power? A new discovery out of Columbia University may someday eliminate that scenario in a flash.

On Wednesday morning, a team of engineers from Columbia announced the creation of a camera that is completely self-powered — no battery, no charging cables, no solar panels. The camera’s sensor contains technology that can take in the light in a room and transfer it into usable energy.

So, as long as there is enough light, the research team’s camera would be able to snap one photo per second, forever.

The camera is currently a prototype, though lead researcher Shree Nayar of Columbia said a self-powered camera could eventually make its way to wearable devices, Internet of Things gadgets, and smartphones. He also said it could hypothetically even charge the battery of your gadget while it isn’t in use.

“We’re in the middle of an imaging revolution,” Nayar said in a phone interview with Yahoo Tech. “And in many of these [emerging] fields, you will want the camera to be a standalone device. You can’t have hundreds of sensors and wires; you want to be able to deploy the camera in a very easy fashion.”

In the prototype, the camera’s pixels (which live in the sensor) not only measure the light in the resulting photograph, as they typically do; they also “harvest” that light to charge the camera’s power supply. The camera doesn’t contain a battery; it has a capacitor that instantly translates the light into energy that powers the camera. (Nayar said a future model could contain a rechargeable battery.)

With only the light from a standard house lamp, the camera’s energy level stays stable while taking one photo per second, as the chart below shows.

A chart maps the brightness in the room against the voltage in the camera. At around 200 lux –– standard room brightness –– the voltage in the camera remained constant, even as the camera took photos. (Photo: Shree Nayar, Columbia University)

We are probably at least several years away from a camera — or a smartphone camera — that houses this technology. Manufacturing something like this on a grand scale, Nayar said, would take either a large investment or the cooperation of a manufacturer with ample resources and a working supply chain.  

The Columbia team will present its findings at this month’s International Conference on Computational Photography at Rice University, where it will also be looking for collaborators for building out the rechargeable technology. Here’s hoping they find some –– for our poor smartphone battery’s sake.