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
I have yet to master the art of 10x zoom by changing the shape of my 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.
Since it seems the lens size is necessarily very small, will the maximum resolutions of the resulting picture be limited in any way? Or is lens size correlated with the maximum resolution of a camera?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
So can you distract a party by yelling, "Nobody move! I've dropped my camera lens."
Being able to get good image quality in tiny cameras is becoming increasingly useful because of the adoption of cameras into phones and similarly small devices. The amount of times I've see something I want to take a picture of, but don't have my camera is pretty significant, and I've found that since getting a camera phone its filled this void nicely. Being able to get a high quality image from a phone would be a great step forward for those who are using phone cameras for this kind of role. (Especially as the amount of storage available increases)
Business Voyeur
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.
I'm glad to see someone patenting an actual invention instead of just claim-jumping someone's idea for a website layout.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
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.
is it waterproof?
To err is human, to really foul up requires a computer
BZZZZT! Thanks for playing! Here's your consolation prize:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Gla
Best Buy can have you arrested
Does this mean your camera will have a "squint" button instead of a focus?
Some people are like slinkys. They're useless, but it puts a smile on your face to push them down the stairs.
"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.
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.
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.
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
... is intelligent design!
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
The human eye can change shape... and zoom?
I've got to figure out how to do that... hell I could fix my nearsightedness!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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!
Actually, the article you cited says at the bottom that there is no clear answer as to whether or not glass is a liquid.
Thanks for playing!
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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?
If you read the entire article, you'll see that "liquid" is by far the least supported classification. Lots of people think glass flows like a liquid over hundreds of years, but it does not. It dosn't flow, or form to its container at all. So it's not a liquid, although it does have some other properties that are liquid-like. Its more a question of "what do mean when we say 'liquid'" then how glass actualy acts.
Most people would not call glass a liquid if they knew how it worked.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
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.
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.
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!