Bug Eyed smartphone camera tech of the future
The animal kingdom has long since inspired man:s technological breakthroughs like flight in birds and fly eyes design that inspired solar cell design, so, its no surprise some very clever humans at the Fraunhofer FacetVision group have invented a 2mm thin camera sensor which sees like insects. Its lens is partitioned into 135 tiny facets. The researchers have named their mini-camera concept facetVISION. How it works
Just as the insects’ eyes, this technology is composed of many small, uniform lenses. They are positioned close together, similar to the pieces of a mosaic. Each facet receives only a small section of its surroundings. The insect’s brain aggregates the many individual images of the facets to a whole picture. In the newly developed facetVISION camera, micro-lenses and aperture arrays take over these functions. Due to the offset of each lens to its associated aperture, each optical channel has an individual viewing direction and always depicts another area of the field of vision.
The multi-faceted eyes of insects
An eye on smartphones
The cameras are said to be suitable for use in the automotive and printing industries and in medical engineering. But the real money will be on how it changes the design of future smartphones."With a camera thickness of only two millimeters, this technology, taken from nature’s model, will enable us to achieve a resolution of up to four megapixel", says Andreas Brückner, project manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena. "
This is clearly a higher resolution compared to cameras in industrial applications – for example in robot technology or automobile production."
No more smartphone camera bumps
Compound eye technology is also suitable for integration into smartphones: today, their mini camera lens is normally five millimeters thick in order to show a satisfactorily sharp image of the surroundings. The manufacturers of ultra-thin smarthones face the following challenge: since the camera is thicker than the smartphone housing, it sticks out of the smartphone’s back cover. The manufacturers call this the "camera-bump" – the unaesthetic "camera bulge". The camera lenses for smartphones are, however, not made on wafers, but in injection molded plastic. In this procedure, hot liquid plastic is poured into the mold in a similar way as batter into a waffle iron. Robots then assemble the finished lenses into the smartphone camera. "We would like to transfer the insect eye principle to this production technology", says Brückner. "For example, it will be possible to place several smaller lenses next to each other in the smartphone camera. The combination of facet effect and proven injection molded lenses will enable resolutions of more than 10 megapixels in a camera requiring just a thickness of around three and a half millimeters."
Fraunhofer has opened www.facetvision.de web site devoted to this project for those wanting an in-depth look at the technology.
