A standard digital camera used in a car for stuff like emergency braking has a perceptual latency of a hair above 20 milliseconds. That’s just the time needed for a camera to transform the photons hitting its aperture into electrical chargers using either CMOS or CCD sensors. It doesn’t count the further milliseconds needed to send that information to an onboard computer or process it there. A team of MIT researchers figured that if you had a chip that could process photons directly, you could skip the entire digitization step and perform calculations with the photons themselves.