Researchers develop flat lens a thousand times thinner than a human hair:
A lens that is a thousand times thinner than a human hair has been developed in Brazil by researchers at the University of São Paulo's São Carlos School of Engineering (EESC-USP). It can serve as a camera lens in smartphones or be used in other devices that depend on sensors.
[...] The lens consists of a single nanometric layer of silicon on arrays of nanoposts that interact with light. The structure is printed by photolithography, a well-known technique used to fabricate transistors.
This kind of lens is known as a metalens.
[...] "Our lens has an arbitrary field of view, which ideally can reach 180° without image distortion," Rezende Martins said. "We've tested its effectiveness for an angle of 110°. With wider angles of view, light energy decreases owing to the shadow effect, but this can be corrected by post-processing."
Previously metalenses have been limited in their field of view. This lens opens up a much wider range of possibilities.
Journal Reference:
Augusto Martins, et. al.,On Metalenses with Arbitrarily Wide Field of View, ACS Photonics (DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00479)
(Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:50PM (3 children)
Actually it is a meta lens. I had to look that up myself: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-lens-world-metalens-liquid-crystal.html [phys.org]
My understanding is the lens can be modified by an energy source (manipulated thermally, electrically, magnetically or optically), allowing a programmable lens.
Particularly for a mobile phone that could be a game changer: a small footprint which can cover both wide angle down to potentially telephoto. It could remove the requirement for phones to have multiple cameras with different lenses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @04:54PM (1 child)
And this helps improve porn how?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:38PM
> And this helps improve pron how?
Well, upskirts will be color corrected and in focus, no matter where the new and much smaller camera is located...of course they are still just ethically-challenged (and illegal) as ever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @06:28PM
Unless there is some great breakthrough here, the problem with metalenses of any kind, whether it be for making flat optics or "cloaking" devices, is that they essentially only work at a single wavelength. Other wavelengths don't interact the same way as the one it was tuned for, so it is always "some day" that these "can be used in a cell phone". That step between now and "some day" has been very large.