Philips Develops Fluid Lenses

Lars T. writes "Digital Photography Review has a short report indicating: 'Philips Research at the CeBIT exhibition is demonstrating a unique variable-focus lens system that has no mechanical moving parts. Suited to a wide range of optical imaging applications, including digital cameras.' Here is Philips' press release and the Heise News article (in German) where I first heard about it. The latter also mentions that Philips has recently used the same electrowetting effect in an 'ePaper' display prototype."

Comments

Applications to Eyewear

[zalas]

Would it be possible to adapt this type of lens to eyewear by enlarging the size? Instead of using bifocals or trifocals, you might be able to have just one lens that changes shape according to a microcontroller, which is then hooked to either a button, or perhaps tapped into a nerve, which can then be trained to send the appropriate signals.

Artificial Eyes?

[chendo]

Could this be a step for manufacturing artificial eyes? Being able to actually zoom in with my eyes would be cool, and if it has NekkidVision(TM), it would be even better :)

Good for photography...maybe

[mikeophile]

Modern photographic lenses have special coatings to reduce reflections from the air gap between two lenses.

For single lens cameras, no coatings are not that big a problem.

For multiple lens cameras, it can lead to a lot of chromatic aberations.

If these oil lenses can accept liquid optical layers, look out Karl Zeiss.

Stop saying "no moving parts", please

[SuperBanana]

Make a lense without moving parts

Everyone keeps saying this. I looked at the diagram, and at least one part of the lens moves. That's a moving part, folks. Stop saying it "has no moving parts".

Now, here are some predictions:

• They'll still break. Electrodes will corrode. Membranes will rupture. Say they discover after extended operation that the first units put a little too much voltage through the lens or something. You get the idea.
• Materials used, such as the membranes, will age. Either becoming stiff, brittle, or simply change properties enough that the lens doesn't focus the way it was supposed to
• the curve won't be as perfect as everyone is hyping and initial cameras will have excessively blurry images, or images that are blurry in parts but not others due to inconsistencies in high-volume manufacturing of the membranes(think LCD screen "acceptable bad pixel count")
• light loss will be significant. Whereas in the glass optics field we have multicoated lenses that are incredibly efficient, none of those coatings could be applied to the materials on this lens, and furthermore, you've got(for each element) 4 surfaces, not two, for light to pass through.
• Color balance will be odd despite calibration efforts, and will change as the fluid/membranes age(probably from UV exposure).
• It will be useless on anything other than consumer point&shoots. The sensor on a Canon 10D DSLR for example is almost twice the width of that prototype they showed, and uses lenses 2-3x larger still.

Hermetically closed underwater camera!!!

[pesc]

I am a scuba diver and I always wanted to have a small camera when i dive. The ones you can buy now are quite expensive and fragile. Most models use a underwater housing for a standard digital camera that is quite fragile. There is a rubber O-ring around the enclosure to keep the thing water tight. But sometimes you get some dirt on the rubber and the camera leaks when you are 30m below the surface, spoiling your camera.

So I have always dreamt of a hermetically closed camera. You could fill it with a liquid (oil?) to reduce the pressure stress on the enclosing. (This is what current scuba computers do.) By using a digital camera, you don't have to open the camera to access the film. The problem so far has been how to construct a zoom lens since these vary in volume. This kind of lens seems to fix that problem!

A brave new world of imaging!

[Genda]

This is way cool...

This makes a lot of things possible that would have been prohibitively expensive, mechanically improbable, or optically restrictive. A small lense with fast focusing, which is high quality, shock resistent (this would depend on oil viscosity and lenses size), and remarkably cheap to manufacture in large numbers would revolutionize;

* Robotic vision,
* Consumer electronics,
* Security and Research imaging,
* Medical Imaging, and Lense Replacement.

You could cover a robot with cheap eagle-eye imaging devices, create a central imaging system that sews all the images together to produce an ultra-highres 360 degree whole world views. This machine would literally have eyes in the back of it's head. Give the critter broad spectrum vision, and spectrospopic analysis, and this robot could be used for anything from public safety, to mineral evaluation for mining. If you're going to buy a robot, make sure it has "Phillip's whole world vision(tm)".

This makes disposable highres digital cameras and camcorders totally practical. It makes low end devices possible, products for tens of dollars or less, that have the optical features you would expect to find in products that now cost hundreds of dollars. This is especially true if you combine glass element(s) to the lens. You get the power and optical benefit of a glass front lense, a large optical aperture for light gathering, with simple focus and zooming capabilities provided by liquid lenses. A superior lense with a huge list of advantages. Sign me up!

Now that you have a high quality cameras selling for $10.00, you can put them anywhere and everywhere. Imaging for a whole host of purposes becomes ubiquitous (orders of magnitude more prevalent than today.)

Beside giving medical devices better vision, replacing the lense in the human eye, with one that is for all intents and purposes perfect, would be a godsend to millions of people with cataracts, degenerative lense desease, and missing or injured lenses. In the end, this might become so common place, that when you get to that age where folks noadays begin buying multifocal glasses, our descendents will simply get a super lense implant, and have bionic visual abilities that we can only imagine. Would you trade your eyes in for one's that gave you superwide angle and telescopic capabilities? Oh, and for those folks with astigmatic trouble, one could circle the inside of the lense barrel with panels, and apply differing voltages to the panels so as to create a lense shape consistent with any corneal asymetries. This would be the hot new product among the rich and graying!

Genda