Slashdot Mirror
New Digital Camera Lens Made of Liquid
Clarinase writes "101reviews is running an article about a new type of camera lens called Fluidlens. This patented lens made of liquid is no bigger than a contact lens, but can still achieve up to 10 times optical zoom by changing its shape similar to the human eye."
BTW, I checked, all the links in the original article still work.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
BZZZZT! Thanks for playing! Here's your consolation prize:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Gla
Best Buy can have you arrested
No it is NOT!
morcego
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glas s/glass.html
Short answer: Don't know. Could be either.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
The diagrams show how it can both zoom and focus by changing shape, while the human eye only focuses by changing shape (and loses flexibility with age, thus presbyopia, or loss of near vision in age, which few of you slashdot whippersnappers know about).
The diagram shows how it gets pushed or pulled in two sections, a top and a bottom, which mimics a 2-element 1-group lens. It may focus with the "front" half and change focal length with the back, or use a combination of both to get the right focal length and focal plane for a given situation.
The lens in a vertebrate eye (and many invertebrates too) is flexible and is focused at "infinity" when in the relaxed state. When pulled by little muscles that surround it, it flattens, and that changes the focal plane so that it focuses on near objects. The focal length is fixed, so there can be no change in angle of view (zooming).
Normal myopia (nearsightedness), hypermetropia (farsightedness) and astigmatism come from the whole eye being the wrong shape, usually a function of the eye being squished one way or the other during childhood growth, and the lens tries to focus where it can't.
Lens size is correlated with the amount of light captured by the lens, and not the size of the image.
In fact, for a long time hobbyists have played around with "pin-hole" cameras, cameras that, well, have a pin hole in the place of a lens. The light diffracts throught the small hole, spreading out and thus blowing up the image.
Really expensive lenses such as you'd see in telescopes are big so they can get the maximum amount of light.
For a neat demonstration of this principle, take some binoculars and cover half of one lens. You'll notice that-- surprise, surprise-- you still see the entire image!
So, in the end, the lens diameter will allow you to take pictures in lower light situations. Which might well equate to better picture quality if you're not in bright, shiny daylight since the picture will be acquired faster with less chance for motion blur.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Except that the previous article talked about an oil-and-water lens, and specifically mentioned using 40V to alter the shape.
THIS article says it has no moving parts, and does not use electricity to deform the lens - a valuable attribute in things like camera phones.
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
That's part of it - squinting also helps to reduce the amount of light entering the eye.
8 1
Plenty of details here:
http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/ask/?quid=7
Chris
I know a little sig that's just ten words long
Not really. They are two different approaches. In fact, this article mentions that they're different from the electric-field-applying camp.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
Glass is an amorphous solid.
No it's not. It has some similarities, such as having no regular arangement in its atoms, but unlike a liquid, which have no strong forces holding the molecules together, glass is held solid by strong chemical bonds almost as if it were one giant molecule. Glass does not flow at room temperature, the defects you see in old glass windows are not because it has been flowing slowly over the past century but are due to the manufacturing process in creating those windows.
Glass has a viscosity (at room temp) of aproximately 10 to the 20th power poises while water (to give you a reference point) is about 0.01 poise.
Oh and if you think that because you can use the term viscosity when refering to glass that it is a liquid I should let you know that lead has an estimated viscosity of 10 to the 11th power poises.
Take a look at some of the oldest glass structures we have, Stained glass windows in some of the worlds ancient cathederals. If your 100 year old house shows much distortion do to flow imagine what an 800 year old stained glass window should look like, except it doesn't.
Glass does not flow at room temperature.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
"By squinting people are actually changing the shape of their eye, just ever so little, so that the light focuses correctly on the retina.
Squinting also decreases the amount of light that enters the eye. Go ahead and squint right now - notice that you can start to see your bottom and top eyelid. When a lens is misshapen (due to age, damage or genetics) the light that passes through the lens is deflected incorrectly and misses the focal point; the farther the light rays are from the center of the lens, the more they are deviated from the focal point. By limiting the rays of light that come in through the bottom and top of the pupil, squinting allows rays to pass closer to the center of the lens, thereby creating a more focused image. So, that means that squinting works by two mechanisms - by both changing the shape of the eye and by letting in light that can be focused more precisely by the lens."
I know a little sig that's just ten words long
Or, I could just post the text of the article here :)
--**--
Named Fluidlens, this lens is made of liquid and is no bigger than a contact lens, but can achieve an optical zoom of up to 10 times, matching the zoom capabilities of lenses found on mid-range and high-end digital cameras and superior than most cellphone cameras which use digital zoom that relies on software rather than the lens to zoom in on an object.
This liquid lens system achieves optical zooming through altering its focal length by changing its shape which mimics the action of the human eye.
"Currently there is no practical alternative to compensate for the fixed focus lens system where a camera lens, for example, is moved along a linear axis until the image comes into focus. Our liquid lens, on the other hand, comprises only a droplet and no other cumbersome movable parts," explains Dr Saman Dharmatilleke, a research scientist working on the technology.
Fluidlens liquid lens system To date, research in other liquid lenses involves using an applied electrical voltage to alter the curvature of the lens so that it can focus and zoom in on an image. Patented Fluidlens does not need this, which means it saves on battery consumption, is cheaper to manufacture and occupies less space in the device.
Singapore-based A*STAR's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) who developed and patented this new liquid lens has licensed the technology to electronics manufacturer, PGS Precision, for an undisclosed sum. The manufacturer expects production cost of Fluidlens to be 20 per cent cheaper than conventional lenses.
PGS Precision will run field tests over the next 18 months and is currently in talks with cellphone makers. It expects to make 10 million lenses a year after tests are completed.
Fluidlens will enable digital camera and camera cellphone makers to create slimmer, better-featured devices with longer battery-life.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
I was under the impression that squinting, like the sungalsses you mention, do not filter scattered light, but rather artifically reduce the aperture of you lens, increasing the depth of field. The result is that an object which is not at the image plane is more likely to be "in focus", thus relieving your eye from needing to focus to that point. It's particularly good for astigmatism, as the small aperture compensates for the cylidrical portion of the lens. The down side is that you lose total light collection.
Note that the opposite is true, as well. When your iris is at its largerst aperture (at night, in dim lighting), your vision will be at its worst.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
glass
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
It'll never happen. Telephoto or "zoom" lenses require a pair of lenses with some amount of separation between them. There's no practical way to mount additional lensing in front of your eye with enough separation to get a zoom effect and not interfere with normal eye function.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yeah, I knew a guy from Alaska who had stories of people carrying alcohol on hikes and taking a drink - your throat just gets frozen. Here's a link where someone almost died, but the doctor used a tube to get liquid into the victim. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ice/filmmore/referenc e/interview/vaughan08.html
This is not 'real' inovation, they've been using the technique in Arfrica for years as a cheep way of producing glasses.
I coudln't find any info on google but I'm fairly sure they were invented by the wind up radio guy.
or if your really after pior art, it looks like the Greeks may have beaten them to it by 3000 years.
Here's an encarta link too
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Yes, I can think of two creatures with multiple fixed focal length optics (no zoom lenses to my knowledge).
The first is the dragonfly. The configuration of this insect's compound lens is such that the upward facing facets operate like a telephoto lens and the bulk of the rest of the eye is wide-angle. This gives the dragonfly near 360 vision but with a high resolution zoom on the airspace above to enable seeing (and catching) small flying insects.
The second are spiders which have 4 pairs of eyes of differing sizes. These eyes, especially in ambush hunters such as a jumping spider, have different effective focal lengths to provide wide angle vision for an overview and narrow field vision for catching stuff.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.