Jumping spiders inspire ultra-efficient 3D camera

By borrowing a trick from tiny jumping spiders, Northwestern University engineers have developed an extremely energy-efficient 3D camera. Called SpiderCam, the new device senses depth the same way that jumping spiders judge distances before making a high-precision hop. To estimate depth, the system captures two images of the same scene with slightly different focus settings and measures subtle differences in blurriness between the two images.