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."

Comments

sigh

[grub]

When reading the article my main thoughts were "Pretty cool sounding tech..." then I read the final paragraph.

Varioptics has just filed a further two patents, and will pursue an aggressive intellectual property strategy. "We think, and out patent advisors think, that this is the only way you can do it [build an auto focussing lens] with liquid," Paillard says. "So anyone who wants to build something like this will need a licence from us."

I just lost so much enthusiasm for this idea.

Humidity, physical contact, etc.

[SiennaLizard]

Touch that drop of water/oil or expose it to a change in humidity and BANG! You need a portable lens maintenance kit. Imagine having to respond to an error message on the phone by putting drops of fluid into a tine aperture! Or maybe you'd have to send it back...

Well this will put to

[famouswhendead]

rest that mobile phones will replace consumer digital camera... This is a good article to see that they will go a different direction.

Space lens

[WindBourne]

Just thinking about the hubble and other spy-sats, this may really be a god send for cheap telescopes. Depending on maximum sizes it should be possible to build a system with parellel cameras. Cheap and accurate.

Dune, anyone?

[evanbd]

Unless I'm mistaken (it's been a while), they had oil-based optics in binoculars in Dune. Always cool when a science fiction idea sees real life :)

Refractive?

[gninnor]

Refractive indexes are different for different wavelengths. Wouldn't this give a rainbow effect like cheap binoculars? I also wonder about long term stability of the liquids and solid. I could see the images getting cloudy, but I guess not in the life span of a Cell phone. For a new technology, though, it looks promising.

What about the winter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Minnesota, and during the winter, it's not uncommon to have subzero temps. Would you need to worry about the lense freezing? Even worse, becoming damaged if the small amount of liquid were frozen solid.

Similar to atmospheric correction?

[Woogiemonger]

I wonder if the technology is similar to what observatory telescopes are using to warp mirrors for atmospheric correction. The difference offhand is the feedback mechanism that sensors provide the telescope to warp its mirror constantly, but it has to adjust very fast, and therefore I just pictured a liquid camera phone lens having a similar viscosity, controlled by similar technology. Now digital cameras with atmospheric correction built in, where you have heterogenous warping of the lens would be neat, so you can take clear pictures through fog and smoke.

Re:Zooming

[tambo]

So uh... it's liquid, right? And liquids have some annoying tendencies... freezing, boiling, expanding/contracting, leaking, drying up? Liquids respond much more dynamically to temperature changes than solids, especially glass.

Even if they won't freeze or boil within normal operating temperatures - they're still running current through it, right? Even if the liquid is stable and inert from -10C to +40C, an electric problem could cause it to heat up in a hurry.

- David Stein

Re:Durability (Shock Proof?)

[Concerned Onlooker]

I wonder about the ability of the lens to sustain shock (and not just the kind from bad composition). If you've ever put oil and water in a jar and shaken it you get tiny "bubbles" of oil that don't immediately mix back into the large mass of oil.

Given the jarring hits I've seen some phones take I wonder what that would do to the oil/water barrier. Or perhaps it's just too small with not enough mass to act in the same way as the jar of oil/water analogy.

Re:SciFi to Reality

[Moekandu]

He was basing it on slightly different technology that has existed for many years used with microscopes.

If you have a properly designed glass lens and you have a drop of oil between the lens and the subject you can resolve far greater detail than with a normal lens (say 1000x as compared to 300x). The problem was that no one had developed a way to encase the oil so that it would stay stable and clean, while still exibiting the same optic properties.

Until now. I actually remember reading about this company when it first formed. It's cool to see their progress in bringing this technology to market.

I think Frank had conceived suspending the oil in a something like a shield field. I think Varioptic's solution is just a bit more elegant (in spite of being a raving Herbert fan).