1080p, 3 CCDs, a couple of inches in size, and 2.3 ounces? Yep, you heard that right:

Iconix Products

The ICONIX HD-RH1 is a tiny HD camera, with output in SDI, DVI-D, or analog BNC, up to 1080p resolution, and apparently serious performance for “POV” applications. In fairness, only the head is this tiny; you have to attach to a larger controller to use. But for hiding a tiny HD camera in an installation, this is a true beauty. Now the bad news: US$15,000 sticker price, though rentals are available.

And they look cute as eggs:

Mmmm, HD omelet.

Imagine this rig: an HD camera for installation, simultaneously routed to a computer for analysis, mixed back to full HD visuals for content. Of course, for now, you’d likely want to downsample the resolution for doing motion detection and such — unless someone knows of a hardware solution that could assist a computer CPU in doing the computation. (I expect at some point, with more advanced GPUs, we’ll be doing more GPU-native computation of actual motion detection.) I could see tools like Processing/Java as wrappers for animation, while all the hard number-crunching happens somewhere else.

Anyway, that leaves you lots of time to write the grant for renting the camera.

Via the fabulous French-language blog Le Collagiste VJ, which is what I would aspire toward for CDMo if we wrote natively in French.