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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: 2) by crafoo on Thursday August 27 2020, @07:56PM
No, I don't think so. I believe it's using structures on the order of size of wavelength of visible light, making them diffractive and not refractive lenses (Fresnel lenses).
This quote from the summary annoyed me a little, "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."
Just say it has an effective FoV of 110deg. Obviously post-processing cannot compensate for lack of light, or at least significantly reduces your options as you will have to blast the scene with an absurd amount of light.