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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."
This company was only founded two years ago, I wonder how much has been put into testing the quality and durability of the oil, which is subject to voltage going through it every now and then. However given the rate people change their mobile phones, durability might not have to be a feature.
Other than that, it's a great invention, no wonder the guy will pursue an aggressive intellectual property strategy, so anyone who wants to build something like this will need a licence from them.
There's also a mentiond of true zoom capability, using two of the liquid lenses. Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of being very small, since you need more depth to create the zooming effect, no?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
When reading the article my main thoughts were "Pretty cool sounding tech..." then I read the final paragraph. I just lost so much enthusiasm for this idea.
Trolling is a art,
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reduce! ack!
With liquid lens and OLEDs, very soon most electronics will be sprayed into place!
2/100ths of a second? That's much faster than those common-as-muck 1/50ths ones.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
I love liquid lenses. I often indulge in testing sessions where upon I don my own pair of "liquid lenses" by drinking 8 pints. It's sooo cool how it makes all the ugly chicks look like Jennifer Aniston!
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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 :)
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!
On mobile phone cameras quality is not a huge deal but I am still rather skeptical about use in medical equipment though. Medical stuff needs to be far more precise and hold its precision over a long time. "Hard stuff" like glass will be hard to displace with sqishy lenses.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Artificial eyes and camera capable of very fast, accurate focus could be built from these. But they have patented the technology (such as it is) up the ying/yang. What this means is they are now sitting on their duffs, waiting for money to roll in. They technology could be improved and create real breakthroughs...but it's patented, so those good ideas will languish for your great great great great grandchildren. When the patent expires in 2196, the technology will be improved, patented again, and improved again in 2305 when that patent expires. Millions could have benefited from it in the interum, but alas, why improve things when you can patent and stifle?
From my (very, very shallow) understanding of the technology, it sounds like it could do pretty well (in theory, at least) in "prosthetic-eye/lens-type" uses...at least for people with lens-dengenerative issues.
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
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.
I wonder how Philips feels about it.
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.
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 don't think this is an issue. However, I do wonder how the lense would respond in cold weather. The 2/100th of a second is only going to be valid for certain temperature ranges.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
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.
...you'll be able to dress a very tiny salad after you call for a rescue.
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.
Therefore, I'm not yet impressed by the claim that this lens can be focused without moving parts. First I'd need to be convinced that it needs to be focused at all, for the intended application.
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
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.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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...