Robert Niessner wrote:Well, we all have witnessed how well an interchangeable sensor module worked out with Blackmagic's turret. And what happend to the modular mobile phone, when even Google with all its resources had to give up that project. And as soon as you are hitting bandwidth or processing power limits, a modular approach won't help - because then basically you have to exchange every single part.
I would argue this concept isn't very comparable to those because in each of those instances the company in question, were designing their modular systems from the ground up. There were no standards for interchangeable sensors so BMD for ex made their own way. For whatever reason, we can speculate for days ( thermals, signal integrity, processing ) it turned out being much more complicated and hard to design for.
What octopus is doing building around very common 3rd party industrial sensor modules. These are typically used in manufacturing, surveillance, etc...
You plug them in a computer over PCI-Express or USB 3.1 and with their included software packages you can pipe the image data right into a PC. Or in this case an Intel based mini PC.
So no I don't see the same hurdles here necessarily, they are going through an established/standardized means so they cut out all the overhead and headaches of designing this modularity themselves.
One of drawbacks of this I'm going to speculate is cost. The "all-in-one" nature of those sensor modules I would think makes them cost a lot more than it would equivalent to building the sensor onto your own product from scratch.
You also limit yourself to what the 3rd party sensor manufacturer has in terms of catalog. You will only have so many sensors to choose from.
Also I think it's going to quite a hefty cost to buy into this Octopus camera system overall, especially with the volumes they will be selling at initially.