OV6948 and the Future of the TikTok Challenge

The OV6948.

I’m a big ole’ geek. Sort of. I’m not exactly “Revenge of the Nerds,” unless you want to go for Booger, which I’m at a slight loss to deny. But this isn’t a science site, so I keep my love of geekiness under the hood. But this thing I ran across, I just gotta’ share.

It’s the OV6948. Sexy name. I would name the first actual terminator this and let people shorten it to ‘Ovee.’ No, this is not a terminator, much smaller. It’s a camera.

The “Ovee” is a camera. A small camera. A very small camera. How small? How about a grain of salt? Yeah, this camera is the size of a damn grain of salt.

Here’s why that’s good. Medical devices, like endoscopes, can get cross contaminated, like you could get someone else’s Cheeto dust when you get yours. (No, you absolutely would not, I’m just kidding.) But no cleaning method is perfect, so cross-contamination is possible. So ideally, you’d want disposable endoscopes, and cameras that tiny are a windfall to that effort.

Here’s why that’s bad. A camera that small could be put on a fly, maybe even a mosquito. A gnat, those pains the ass that you always seem to get? How would you know that a camera wasn’t on that thing, watching you offload cargo while you check your phone?

What would be cool is if you could have gloves with a bunch of cameras on them, and a little heads-up display on a pair of glasses that would show you whatever you were reaching into. Plumbers and electricians would love those.

Imagine these things getting WiFi? So maybe they’ll be the size of two grains of salt. You could mail people stuff and embed a camera, know that they looked at it. Sprinkle them around in your car for anti-theft.

I’m going to go ahead and pass by all of the creepy, pervy s**t that could also be done with these cameras, because I’m sure you’ve thought up ten by now.

I think the biggest thing is that people would just get used to them. They could be embedded into fashions, just because. People might be a bit more honest if they don’t know whether someone’s got them on candid camera. Of course then we’re talking microphones, so three grains of sand with the Wifi, but still, a three-grain clump is barely noticeable.

The big fear here is that people are going to do even dumber s**t, because they’ll be able to video it with zero effort. Like seriously, we have enough “challenges” landing people in the hospital. The aliens are going to see all this stuff and they won’t visit. And that’s the real fear: no aliens, no probes.

Maybe we can sell them cameras for their probes.