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Metalens

Camera lens inspired by eyes of extinct trilobites can focus on near and far objects at the same time

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Inspiration for new technology is everywhere, even in the fossils of prehistoric creatures it seems. Scientists have developed a nanophotonic light field camera with extreme depth of field capabilities, based on the eye of the extinct trilobite, Dalmanitina socialis.

Ask any palaeontology (or just about any 5 year old) and they will tell you that the trilobite was one of the first animals to develop complex eyes. Very complex it turns out. What made it unique was the fact that it could focus on both near and far objects simultaneously. Most eyes and cameras simply cannot achieve this dual focus feat.

This new tiny camera overcomes the problems of metalenses by using a whole bunch of them at once

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Metalenses have been a thing for a while now. We first wrote about them here on DIYP back in 2016 when a team at Harvard first built a lens that’s even thinner than the waves of light being focused. The goal of such lenses is to essentially shrink cameras down as much as possible. They use nanostructures to focus the light instead of the optics we’re used to in more traditional lenses, but they have something of a flaw.

It’s kind of a fatal flaw, too, and that’s image quality. The images aren’t really sharp, nor are they high resolution – especially when it comes to wide angles. They’re “ok” with a little help from AI, but they’re not great. Now, though, a team of researchers at Nanjing University in China believe they’ve solved the issue, by not just using a single metalens, but a whole array of them, with each tuned to a range of different angles.

Scientists have developed a fully working camera that’s the size of a grain of salt

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Teeny tiny micro-sized nano-optics cameras are a relatively new development and it’s been very exciting to follow. They just keep getting smaller and better. Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have managed to create a fully functional camera that’s as small as a grain of salt. A large grain of salt, but still, that’s mighty impressive.

The “size of a grain of salt” thing has been used before, back in 2016, with respect to the lens, and array of which was placed onto a high resolution CMOS sensor. Now, though, it’s a complete camera at that size.

Engineers at MIT & UMass Lowell have created a completely flat 1mm thick fisheye lens

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Love them or hate them (and many people hate them), we all know what fisheye lenses are. They look sort of like regular lenses, except they have a great big round bulbous element on the front that lets your camera’s sensor see in a super-wide field of view – typically around the 180° degree mark.

Well, not anymore. Now a team at MIT and University of Massachusetts Lowell have developed a new fisheye lens that’s completely flat. Its design is a type of “metalens” – a wafer-thin material with microscopic features to manipulate light in a way that traditional optics don’t. And it lets the lens shoot a 180° field of view with perfect sharpness.

These flat metalenses could revolutionize photography

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Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a revolutionary lens. It’s flat instead of curved, and it focuses the entire visible spectrum and white light in a single point. So far, this was only possible by stacking multiple lenses. But with this new invention, it’s possible to do it with a single lens. This discovery is interesting for us because it could revolutionize photography. If the commercial development starts, metalenses could make the gear far less bulky in the future.

This new camera lens is as small as a grain of salt

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Everything seems to be getting smaller and smaller these days. Cameras and lenses don’t seem to be immune to this phenomenon, despite some cameras pushing for bigger.  Of course, there’s no real right or wrong when it comes to the size of your camera, just whether or not it will do the job.

One of those jobs for cameras is medical, and scientists at the University of Stuttgart are really taking it to the extreme in a new paper published in Nature Photonics, producing lenses that are 120 millionths of a meter in diameter.

The camera lenses of the future could be thinner than the light they focus

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A team at Harvard University have build a lens that’s thinner than the waves of light it focuses.  Based on light-warping metamaterials, this lens may one day replace the heavier glass lenses found in items like microscopes, smartphones, cameras and even telescopes.

Lens technology has come a very long way since those early days, but it’s still difficult to build very compact lenses.  If you’ve ever wondered why your phone’s camera lens sticks slightly proud of the back, this is why.

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