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."
Cool beans. That's pretty sweet. Wonder if they'll be able to build something like an eagle's eye that can see both macroscopic and microscopic extremes. That'd be sweet.
If they could make it into a contact lens, allowing the wearer to view distances without the benefit of binoculars.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Somewhat light on detail. So is the effective zoom limited only by the amount of liquid they can put between the squeezy-things?
Is the real innovation in the material of the lens or the method to make it deform to specification?
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
"OIL LENS: hufuf oil held in static tension by an enclosing force field within a viewing tube as part of a magnifying or other light-manipulation system. Because each lens element can be adjusted individually one micron at a time, the oil lens is considered the ultimate in accuracy for manipulating visual light." -- DUNE, "Terminology of the Imperium."
This is right up there with those relatively small, sealed nuclear reactors, IMHO. Neat.
What you're actually doing is depriving the rods and cones in your eyes of blood. Similar to the nerves in your leg sending 'static' signals back your your brain when your leg falling alseep, your eye's start doing the same.
See there webpage here.
Incorrect. Squinting acts as a filter for scattered light (kind of like how those showboxes with the pinholes in them allow you to see an eclipse).
There was a guy a number of years back who sold "sunglasses guarenteed to improve your sight!" and all it was was a opaque plastic lens with hundreds of tiny holes in it.
To do any kind of zooming, you need 2 lenses, I believe, otherwise it's just a shift in focal points.
My digital didn't work well on the ski slopes anyway - I ran out of charge in double-quuick time. It seems that the batteries just don't like it cold.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I'm certainly no expert on photography, but it seems to me that the maximum resolution doesn't have much to do with the size of the lens.
Maximum resolution has quite a lot to do with the size of the lens.
Sure, you can make a sensor with 50 million pixels on it, but if the resolution of the image coming through the lens only carries an equivalent of 1,000 or so lines horizontally and vertically, you're just going to be getting a very large file, not a high-resolution one.
(This is the scam already happening with a lot of 7mp and up consumer-level digicams - they just do not have the optics required to pass that level of detail.)
The larger a lens is, the more light it can let through. And that's all an image is to a camera - light. On film, that light hits the crystals contained in the celluloid and chemically excites them, whereas on a digital sensor the light is converted to binary data representing the image. In both cases, though, light is all that matters.
Bigger lenses can obviously gather more light, which means they can be used in lower-light situations or at longer focal lengths (longer focal lengths involve more light fall-off inside the lens, so it helps for extreme telephoto lenses to have massive front elements). It also means the sensor does not need to have its gain cranked up so high to compensate for a smaller lens. And it means the sensor itself can be larger, which in itself will allow greater resolution.
Probably the most important thing, though, is that larger lenses can more easily achieve perfect focus. It is possible for a lens to be simply unable to achieve perfect focus - the light beams will just never converge properly. This is not an exact science - every lens is slightly different in this (even among the same model), but larger lenses can come closer because they're dealing with the same projected image size but have more incoming light with which to deal and larger elements that can be built to stricter relative tolerances. This has the greatest effect on real resolution, and it's why some lenses appear tack-sharp and others look a bit soft.
Relatedly, the larger the lens, the less effect manufacturing tolerances are going to have on quality. For example, say an element can be ground to within 0.001mm of spec and still be within that spec. If you shrink the lens down by 100 times and you can still only manage a 0.001mm tolerance, you will not have any real consistency in quality. You would have to similarly up your manufacturing tolerances by 100 times just to maintain the quality of the larger lens.
This is even ignoring all the image defects you get from smaller lenses. Photographic lenses usually have 6 or more elements inside them to correct for various distortions that the curved glass introduces; obviously this is going to be a lot more difficult to do the smaller you go, and I can't see how a lens with liquid inside is really going to be able to simulate this. It might be able to replicate one or two interior elements (even though liquid is infinitely maleable, it can still only be one shape at a time) but I would imagine there will always be distortions left over.
You may ask how our eyes work so well, then, given how small they are. Well, for one thing, our eyes are "prime" lenses - they don't have an optical zoom function. For another, we have a big, powerful brain sitting behind them to interpret what we're looking at and correct any oddities (the image your eyes are actually seeing and the image you interpret are not even close to being the same thing). The fact that we've got two of them doesn't hurt either - it's not just about depth perception, just close one eye and see how good your vision is for a while. Peripheral vision will be cut, it is harder to focus, etc. Your brain does a good job of taking these two images and combining them, making it easier to see. Having two eyes also means we have double the light gathering ability.
Also, many people's eyes *don't* work so well.
I was looking to patent an idea like this. I created a liquid lense with oil and Iron-Oxide -- nothing really exotic, Ferro-fluids have been used for quite a while. In my design I used a combination of ionization and magnetism to shape the lense. It was only part of a more complicated idea--I didn't think the lense was worth a patent by itself--kind of obvious. The only reason this is useful now is that we have new technologies in video that can actually use such a tiny lense.
I was actually using this to move a laser to boost radio signals. I kind of gave up on the whole thing because I didn't have a job and didn't have any idea how to get the ball rolling. I'm an idea synthesizer-- not a lawyer. Anyway, I could have had about five patents out of this.
So, in short, this lense may possibly be as simple as mineral oil and rust surrounded by water between two pieces of glass (I haven't been able to read the article due to the "slashdot effect"). Inside the small area of water, surface tension works to hold the shape and relax the effects of gravity--It's best to have an oil of the same specific gravity as water (most are lighter) so that motion will not pull one liquid more than another. Still, unless you used a strong magnetic field on the ferro-fluid, motion would change its shape-- so no long exposures. The difference in light distortion between the water and the oil will allow for your lense to focus. My idea was to use two lasers--one as a reference beam to calculate unwanted distortions. I'm guessing there is going to have to be some feedback mechanism to determine what the spherical abberation of the resulting liquid lense would be. I wouldn't want to say anymore because it would then be easy to guess the tricks I figured out. Since I have nothing but a love of science and no degrees in the material sciences, the actual fabrication of this device would not be my forte.
On an aside, I still think it would be a nice idea to spin water in space to create a large lense for telescopic or sunlight collection purposes. About 30 years ago, when fiber optics first came out, I played with a lot of ideas for uses-- things like piping sunlight into the house, using it to peer inside the body and lase out blockages (I used a parasol design to stop blood flow and expand arteries--rather than a more obvious and more elegant balloon). It amazes me that things as obvious as a liquid lense can still find patentable uses.
I actually submitted this as an idea to a company that says it helps people with Inventions. When I got a follow call asking for $1200 more than the original $500 I realized it was a scam (sigh). If these scumbags realize they have prior art--I'm guessing they won't, since they are about scamming more than actually understanding any technology that people submit. Well, lessons learned. Nobody is going to "discover" your brilliance in life--everyone has to do their own leg work.
One of these days, I'd love to get back to inventing.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Looks like you got I post in before I responded, but here's the basics of want I was going to say.
There are acutally many families of glasses other than silicate based. There are borate based glasses, germanate based glasses, phosphate based glasses, etc.
I think where we differ is in the definion of flow. If something has a viscosity it means it moves when a force is applied - which all glass does (otherwise it's a crystaline solid). So I'm not claiming that any glass flows freely at room temp in the sense that you can pour it....just that it is technically moving. It's more of a gradual creep (e.g. windows will widen at the base over time...but it's been calculated to take millions of years for typical window glass, not the few hundred in the urban myths).
The glass with roomtemp flow I was referring to was just a general mixture of potassium silicate and sodium silicate. Melt those components together and cool. It flows when exposed to humidity. You can break it and get a sharp edge that will dull over a short period of time (kind of like a jolly rancher in hot, humid conditions). Of course there are probably some glass experts out there that can argue that it's not the best example of true room temp flow.
Well it is always nice to see science catch up with Science Fiction. I remember Frank Herbert writing about binoculars with oil lenses in Dune. Nice to see our favorite authors weren't crazy, just ahead of their time.
The vodka I keep in my freezer at -18C (or at least I hope so, that chicken did taste odd) becomes rather thick at that temp. Good for vodka, bad for optical hardware (I'd think).
No, but it does become more viscous at lower temperatures. I once put a bottle of Smirnoff in the freezer several hours before a little gathering. Unlike Polar Ice (which is meant to be used at that temperature) Smirnoff thickened. Pouring a normal (1-1.5oz) drink tasted like a triple. So, even if a liquid doesn't freeze (become solid) it still can affect its intended use. Of course assuming this lens isn't water, there's not the fear of it expanding and damaging the rest of the camera as water/ice would do.
I'd like this in my camera, but I'd REALLY love to have adjustable eyes again. At about age 50, the eye's lens gets too stiff to see both distant and closeup objects - a real pain. If these new lenses can be made large enough for eye glasses, or uses as a lens implant, they could auto adjust to the range one is looking at using an ultrasonic ranging sensor. Many people over 50 would buy it if the price was at all reasonable. It's an idea with trillion dollar potential. I've heard that it will soon be possible to replace the overly stiff gell inside the eye's lens so that it will work like a young eye, which would be even better than an electronic eye. Optometrists beware - your unadjustable overpriced product may soon be obsolete!