The design of most camera lenses
reminds us of the human eye, with an iris that opens up more to let
in more light as needed. Those lenses then project the image onto a
flat imaging sensor or film.
But, the eyes of many insects have
large numbers of tiny lenses, usually arranged in a spherical pattern
to to give them a totally different view of the world than you or I
would see. These are usually referred to as compound lenses (as
you’d find on a common house fly), and in the future we be able to
take advantage of the best features of that type of eye design via
sophisticated digital camera technology. That’s because a team of
researchers led by Professor John Rodgers at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is working on technology to mimic what
an insect’s eye may see.
Their first effort is a prototype
camera using a 180 lens array with 180 separate sensors, and Nature
Magazine published an article submitted by the research team titled
“Optical
devices: Seeing the world through an insect’s eyes that goes into the technology used.
Thanks to advances in flexible
electronics and micro lens designs, combined with advances in
computer and software, these new arrays are able to combine the images from each of the camera’s
180 sensors, this type of camera can offer a number of advantages
like a very wide field of view with virtually unlimited depth of
field, along with virtually no distortion like you’d have with a
traditional single lens camera design.
The current prototype developed by the researchers is limited to a
160 degree field of view, with limited resolution. But, as the
technology evolves, we could see more sophisticated designs that see
in all directions at once, with computer technology and software
making it feasible for use in a wide variety of applications like
endoscopic use for medicine, surveillance systems and more; and we
can imagine newer software that could provide for 3D oriented views
of landscapes, home interiors and almost anything else you’d want to
record images of. We live in exciting times.
Images of the camera prototype – John A. Rogers, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
See the article about this camera published in the nature.com
journal at
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7447/full/nature12083.html
To see more of the fascinating technology being developed by the
research teams led by Professor John Rogers, go to
http://rogers.matse.illinois.edu/
