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Liquid Lenses For Camera Phones
Roland Piquepaille writes "In this article, the Register writes that "camera phones will soon have lenses made from nothing more substantial than a couple of drops of oil and water, but will still be capable of auto focusing, and even zooming in on subjects." The lenses, developed by the French company Varioptic, contain drops of oil and water, acting respectively as conductor and insulator, and sandwiched between two windows. These liquid lenses could replace glass or plastic ones because of several advantages: no moving parts, leading to better reliability; a very small power consumption; very small dimensions (diameter: 8mm; thickness: 2mm); and a very fast response time of 2/100th of a second. You can expect the first camera phones using these liquid lenses as early as Christmas 2005. These lenses might also appear in medical equipment, such as endoscopes, optical networking equipment or surveillance devices. This overview contains other details and references."
It's pretty cool that this is coming to pass, even if they're not sandwiched between force fields.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
They were indeed intended for poor communities(countries), but they weren't really intended for self diagnosis. They were intended to be simple and cheap to set at a given prescription by an individual with the proper training. Compared to grinding, twisting a knob is pretty cheap. And it is even quicker.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
when their owners take them out of the warm store and into the freezing winter air, except for those who purchased their phones in Southern climes.....
I thought they've been using liquid optics for years with lasers. Is this an application of that? Liquid for telescope mirrors is also well known for creating a cheap mirror.
There is another recent article on this topic here in the latest issue (Dec 2004) of IEEE Spectrum. From this article it looks like this technology will be commercialized within the next 2-3 years.
It is sandwiched between two protective layers. It may be more fragile than conventional lenses, but it should be durable enough to be excellent value. The cost of adding analogue zoom and focus to such a cameraphone (and keeping it small) would otherwise be prohibitive.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
Tunable Microlens
No idea if they had patents on it. If this French company got there first, these would seem to be very lucrative patents.
As for SciFi being there first, that's hardly an argument we (Geeks) want to see used. If companies can't make money off a technique or concept because a SciFi writer wrote about it abstractly, they will not invest the money needed to create such a technology. We'd have to sit around and wait for some gigantic government initiative like the Space Shuttle to get technology we've long dreamed for. And even then.. it's rarely in a form we can benefit from.
Remeber, its 1% inspiration/ 99% perspiration.
It's gret these SciFi writers inspired our engineers, but the effort that goes in to producing viable products should not remain un-rewarded.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Well, maybe not entirely novel. The concept of a variable oil or water lens was used by microbiology pioneer Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), in his studies of the "wee beasties". His primitive microscopes used drops of liquid as lenses, and as I vaguely recall, he'd worked out a way to wobble the "lens" to change its shape, thus its magnification.
What does seem to be novel here (well, *I've* never heard of it before), and worth noting, is using voltage gadgetry to control the shape and position of the lens. ISTM this may well have other applications, perhaps even in fields not at all related to optics. Frex, it might be used as a tiny pump, perhaps medically useful (apply the concept to blood in chronically-constricted arteries).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
How about from history? Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632 - 1723) Quick overview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/leeu wenhoek_antonie_van.shtml
When I was a kid I had a book with his detailed biography. Quite an interesting fellow. (See also my post above, regarding his primitive lenses.)
As to telescoping lenses, I'd think a droplet lens pair and its "zoomer" could be very small, so small that surface tension would be the most powerful factor affecting the lenses, thus quite stable for applications like arthroscopy.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I saw a similar idea a few weeks ago on a TV show (Next@CNN).
Adaptive Eyecare's adaptive lenses are fluid- filled and the power is changed by varying the amount of fluid in the lens.
The lenses are built into a universal fitting pair of glasses frames, which allow the wearer to adjust the amount of fluid in each lens using a syringe-like device. This results in an individually tuned custom set of corrective vision lenses without an eye-doctor or expensive equipment for vision testing or lens grinding.
From their website: "The starting point for the development of Adaptive Eyecare's technology was the astonishing statistic that according to the World Health Organization there are currently around one billion people - including 10% of school children - in the world who would benefit from vision correction, but are as yet uncorrected. Most of these people live in the developing world, and the problem arises principally because the numbers of personnel trained to deliver vision correction in the conventional way are simply inadequate to meet the needs of the people. These statistics have profound implications - they mean that hundreds of millions of adults do not have the vision correction they need to be socially and economically active, and many children are educationally and socially disadvantaged."
This is a very cool technology that could really change the lives of many disadvantaged people worldwide. I hope that whatever patents are out there do not stifle this sort of use...
Technically, yes. It's a liquid with an incredibly high viscosity, such that its flow is only observable on a geologic time frame.
Realistically, no. It has none of the normal properties of liquids. It retains its shape for hundreds of years. It's hard (try rapping your knuckles on a typical liquid.) It doesn't noticeably expand or contract with temperature and pressure differences. You can't dissolve anything in it in its normal state (maybe when it's molten, but not at 20C.) And it's got almost no heat capacity - heat passes through it almost as if it weren't there.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.