The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete (Enterprise)
Known for weaving engrossing stories from material knotted with numbing complexity, Gilder (Telecosm; Microcosm) delves once again into the world of high-tech business, this time focusing on the company Foveon and its efforts to develop a device that will allow digital machines to see as the human eye does. "Computers can perform instantaneous calculus... and search the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a disk-drive database," he writes. "But they cannot see. Even today, recognizing a face glimpsed in a crowd across an airport lobby, two human eyes can do more image processing than all the supercomputers in the world put together." The book traces a circuitous path in its investigation of Foveon's "silicon eye"-leading through discussions of the magnetic codes on paper checks and of notebook computer touchpads-but Gilder is a competent, eloquent guide. Moreover, the journey is populated with richly limned characters like Dick Merrill, who, with "wire-rim glasses, long white coat, electromagnetic blond hair, a bright feral glint in his skyblue eyes," resembles Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films, and Michelle Mahowald, who decorates her lab walls with "artsy-dispsy posters" and releases "random analog beasts of prey from their safe digital cages." While some readers will find Foveon's saga half-fulfilled, Gilder sees its fulfillment as inevitable. "Foveon," he writes, "can do for the camera what Intel did for the computer: Reduce it to a chip and make it ubiquitous." Whether or not readers are believers by the end of this narrative, the ride is electric.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.