<<news home

Specialized Cameras Being Developed Locally

Canandaigua, NY, October 2, 2007

SpectralSight, an Ontario County technology company, has received $500,000 from the National Science Foundation to help it develop small cameras with potentially vast applications.

The camera technology involved a filter with two tiny mirrors less than a micro apart. At that distance—half the wavelength of a frequency of light—the adjustable mirrors let through only light of a specific color, said SpectralSight President Dennis R. Zander.

Cameras with those filters then can identify individual chemicals or compounds invisible to the naked eye, using the light they reflect—a spectral analysis.

The potential applications are numerous, from cameras that will tell when the sugar in grapes has reached the perfect point for vintners to harvest, to monitors for the military that can tell the difference between desert sand and tanks painted to look sand, Zander said.

SpectralSight is working with Cornell University and a company that collects data for precision farming with the idea that the cameras could pinpoint water-stressed fields.

The physics behind imaging isn't new, with spectrometers that do chemical analysis using light waves being commercially available now.

But spectrometers analyze one specific point or sample instead of a wide image, Zander said. Hyperspectral cameras such as the ones SpectralSight wants to develop haven't been commercially cost-effective, and the cameras are bulky and heavy, said Chief Financial Officer Philip R. Ashe.

The two-person company hopes to have tunable filters ready in six months, which then can be integrated into cameras, with actual products available in 2009, Ashe said.

SpectralSight is one of three companies at the Infotonics Technology Center born from technology developed there, said center CEO David R. Smith.

BioScopix is developing ingestible ultraviolet scanners that would detect cancer in the digestive tract. And tiny microneedles—developed by SensiVida Medical Systems Inc. for noninvasive allergy testing—are in clinical trials now.

Beyond those three, Smith said, the Infotonics center currently houses 20 other companies that came there to use its computer chip manufacturing facilities.

The Infotonics center, created with public and private funds, opened in 2004 in former Xerox Corp. inkjet printing plant. Its primary goal is to help create dozens of high-tech startup companies in areas of photonics and microelectromechanical systems and more than 5,000 jobs in the region by 2012.

So far, the center has created about 100 jobs.

For more information, call 585.919.3000 or Contact Us.

By Matthew Daneman
Democrat & Chronicle
Tue. October 2, 2007