Seeing with less

Here is an interesting story about learning from flies and simplifying the computational requirements of sight in order to better emulate vision and provide for a much lower cost way to detect motion and obstacles the coming generations of small robots.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/fly-eyes/

I was just in a conversation (or is IRC only ever a fight) this morning where I was arguing against trying to construct large exact models of things in order to replicate human biological behaviours without looking around at simpler implementations that could be the inspiration or answer.