A new camera is breaking barriers
A new digital camera designed by a team of scientists literally sees what bugs see. The camera’s design recreates the structure of insects’ eyes to project a fuller, wider, and more focused view than is possible with even the best conventional digital cameras today.
Fire ants and bark beetles were the specific model for this camera, according to a report that the researchers, one of whom is John Rogers, a University of Illinois chemistry and physics professor, published in the May 2 edition of Nature. The report explains that the eye of one of these bugs consists of 200-500 long, cylindrical units called omatidia, each of which includes a cornea connected to a photosensitive organ and surrounded by dark pigment to keep light on one lens from leaking into another lens. All of these omatidia cluster together, with the lens facing outward, to form the bulging multicellular eye shape that we all associate with the insect kingdom. The only key difference among most of them is the number—the dragonfly’s eye has hundreds more omatidia, a level of complexity that defies human engineers’ present-day modeling abilities.
So Rogers’ team emulates the simpler fire ants and bark beetles’ eye by incorporating 200-500 omatidia-like units, each one including an elastic compound that connects a small micolens on one end to a light-receptive computer chip on the other; with all of the “omatidia” embedded in a flexible, curved sheet of rubber.
The lens bulges outward and can capture a view 160 degrees wide, far beyond the visual range of a conventional camera lens, and almost equal to that of a pair of human eyes—human eyes have a vision field almost 180 degrees wide.
But the camera captures the whole field with full depth of field, which means that everything within that 160-degree range is in full focus all at once. That’s a feat that not even the sharpest human eyes can achieve. Just try focusing for a few seconds on everything that your eyes can see at one time for a live demonstration of this. This insectoid camera also doesn’t suffer from the light distortion and peripheral distance effects that are common in many conventional camera lenses.
The prototype camera has an image resolution that’s about on par with the image resolution of a fire ant’s eyes—usable, but less crystal-clear than most human users would like. Higher resolutions will be possible with further product development and fine-tuning, though, according to the researchers.
It will be a long time before any such camera is available for sale to consumers, but the researchers hope that it will be ready for applications in professional surveillance cameras or on military drones in the near future.
Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/new-camera-gives-users-a-bugs-eye-view-of-things/#ixzz2S9exl3Ge
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