source: http://gizmodo.com/this-ultrafast-camera-is-designed-to-work-like-a-human-1189477072
Photos and videos are not lightweight files—they quickly add up to gigabytes of data which can be a dealbreaker a lot of research. Engineers at the Swiss company iniLabs created a better way—a camera that borrows its mechanics from the marvels of the human retina.
The Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) works a lot like the human retina which makes for a hyper efficient and ultrafast camera. The individual neurons in our eyeballs don't actually record all of the information in our field of view; they just spot the changes in movement. This gets rid of tons of extraneous data from the surrounding scene. It's also exactly how the DVS works. By selectively recording only the motion, the DVS can record hours of video using very little power and only a few megabytes of data storage.