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Change of Focus for Liquid Crystals
Dylan Knight Rogers writes to tell us PhysicsWeb is reporting that US physicists have discovered a new liquid-crystal lens design that can alter the focus by varying the voltage applied. From the article: "The new lens, which has been built by Shin-Tson Wu and colleagues at the University of Central Florida, allows the focus to be changed in a new way. The device consists of a mixture of liquid-crystal molecules and smaller N-vinylpyrrollidone monomers placed between two glass substrates, each of which is coated with a thin transparent layer of conducting indium tin oxide. They then placed a concave glass lens with a flat base on top of one of the substrates."
This could be useful for LCD goggles for people who normally need glasses.
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Picture it: A camera that could Auto-focus without any moving, mechanical parts.... faster and more energy efficient!
I wonder what's the percentage of power drained by a typical digital camera just for auto focusing under normal usage.
Sigs are for the weak.
"The only snag with the new device is its long focusing time of about three minutes. This is because the lens is relatively large (9 mm), which means that molecular diffusion across it is slow. However, this should not be problem in micro-sized lenses in which the estimated response time is around 1 second at room temperature."
I take it that means that LCD monitors will not be using this technology any time soon?
Oh You POS
Wow, a device from the 'Dune'. they had neat binoculars based on the same principle if I remember correctly...
Great scott! *LCD monacle pops out*
I remember reading 1 or more years ago (here on /. ?) a very similar story about a new lens. It was thought to be used in mobile phones and such, being a very small lens, with no moving parts, focusing being only done through the voltage applied.
Would someone still have a link to that old story?
Original poster asked a misdirected question, but that doesn't make him "stupid." Is your condescension really helping you feel better about yourself, or do you think maybe it's just getting in the way?
http://www.research.philips.com/technologies/light _dev_microsys/fluidfocus/index.html
6 090/fluid_focus/fluid_focus.wmv
Video of this lens working
mms://ntstream2.ddns.ehv.campus.philips.com/efi/8
Philips' FluidFocus system mimics the action of the human eye using a fluid lens that alters its focal length by changing its shape.
However, this might be used as a way to optimize solar panels as the sun moves across the sky, or to change the field pattern for headlights or taillights to better match current driving conditions.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
the human eye has a simple lens that provides focus on a curved (convex) surface. the good focus is right in the center and your eye moves around to maintain focus on whatever you're looking at.
a regular camera Lens has many elements (glass pieces). even if you could make the glass 'variable', there would still be an amazing amount of complexity to make a clean sharp image on a flat surface (film or sensor).
eric
FTA: The only snag with the new device is its long focusing time of about three minutes.
Perhaps this could help us on our way to stereoscopic head mounted displays that don't induce migraines after extended use (slight sarcasm here). Current technology primarily plays with parallax while keeping a fixed although often tunable focal distance, but LCDs with many microlenses could vastly help things. The perceived images would be much more realistic, as well.
SED FTW
UCF in the hiz-ouse!
Maybe we will be known for something besides the guys who did Blair Witch?
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
or hey, ya know how when you've been staring at a screen so long your vision gets blurry? now that can be simulated!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I know Slashdoters don't read the article before posting, but gosh darn it.. It was never implied in the article that this technology would be adapted for LCDs. Just because something involves "liquid crystal" doesn't automatically mean it's an LCD technology. What we have here is basically a very neat new way of creating an adjustable micro lens. Aside from lenses, "[t]he technique could also be used to make other adaptive microdevices such as prism arrays and phase gratings".
Regards,
Spock_NPA
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/ 17/1428223/ 04/0244233
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03
And another one from the University Laval in Canada whoma was reported on slashdot but don't find the link !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
A while ago on slashdot there was a story about a spiral lens that would enable us to actually see planets of distant stars. Only drawback was that no material known to man is able to construct a lens of such quality. Perhaps with this and other new (as of yet unknown) advances in lens creation technique we will someday be able to construct such a device. The singularity is near......
Qxe4
I remember hearing about these lenses at least a few months ago, probably last year even. There was talk that they could someday be implemented into cell phones, letting them zoom to magnifications you normally get with $1000 lenses on professional cameras, simply by altering the voltage applied across the lens.
This looks like a dupe from a story from last December, I think.
I can't name the exact material but I bet it will have "nano" in its name whenever it is developed.
Transluscent adapative optical nanophlubber!
There ya go, just named it and covered initial marketing, the important stuff, now go to work ya slug-a-bed and make it happen.
LCD VR goggles could use technology like this (assuming improving technology) to help give the illusion of 3D. If you could build an array of these, perhaps you could give near and far objects different focal points.
Creating holographic images might be a better approach though.
Visualize these in human bionic eyes. But, it WOULD be a problem if they independently focused on the same point to where you're running at bionic speeds...
hmmm.. slash image world "inbreed"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
What I want is autofocus eyeglasses in my lifetime.
Sharp have an LCD screen which can deliver a different image to each eye. These screens allow each eye to see alternate columns of pixels. Combine this (or any other stereoscopic system) with the Liquid Crystal Lense and you'd have a very convincing 3D effect. LCL could also have Occ Health & Safety benefits. Your eyes could be exercised by each window having a different focal depth. Fitter eyes = less need for glasses.
Discovered or invented?
I forgot to put in the crystals
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Similar systems have been tested from at least 1996.v .html
http://guernsey.et.tudelft.nl/group/project_lokte
Might it also be used in windows, so that unwanted light could be blocked at times, then the lens would be adjusted to let more light through?
But if you blocked all unwanted light from Windows, you'd get a black screen. How is that useful?
This could definitely be a revolution in rifle optics (a.k.a. scopes), I'd love to see someone implement this technology. It would mean a much smaller and more compact device, even with a small battery pack, I just wonder how rugged it could be...
Philips presented a 'no moving parts' lens back in 2004.
http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/archiv
Think of all the poor chinese children having to put all of those tiny mirrors on while sweating from the unbearable tin smelting pots.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The article states that this technology could have many uses; with more work potentially liquid crystals that can change their thickness could improve current LCD technology.
One optical property of minerals in rocks in the field mineralogy used in identifying
minerals is something called interference colors. To characterize the history of a rock and its constituent minerals, sometimes, a rock is cut into pieces and a thin slice is cut from one of the newly cut surfaces. After more cutting and some polishing, the resulting slice is supposed to be 30m (micrometers) for standard identification and is mounted on a microscope slide. At this thickness silicate minerals which are a large constituent of many different kinds of rocks, and while silicates may appear opaque in a rock, silicates are actually translucent and this feature is brought out in thin section. In addition to being translucent most silicates are crystals and the liquid crystals in LCD panels are both optically anisotropic.
Assuming one had two polarizing films on top of each other at ninety degrees no light would pass between them like most people discovered in grade school science. However, if you put a crystal that is optically anisotropic between these two films and either rotate the crystal or change anisotropy of the crystal though electricity, in the case of the liquid crystal in the case of an LCD screen, the light gets bent in such a way that the light that passed though the first filter actually would actually pass though the second polarizing film. This is basically how LCD screens work and this property is also useful in identifying minerals. Another property of anisotropic minerals is how much each wavelength of light is slowed down which results in the color of the crystal to change; this color is known as the interference color. The interference color also depends on the thickness of the mineral if the slide has been poorly made. The range of interference colors range the entire spectrum and in some cases interference colors can look fluorescent or even pearlescent.
This article seems to mention that with this technology the thickness of a cell of a liquid crystal could be changed. With the right type of liquid crystal, one could make a liquid crystal screen that would use interference colors to produce a full range of colors. Such a display would have a larger gamut of colors that current LCD screens and even CRT monitors and could be capable of unusual color effects.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Adaptive Optics.
(like the kind used for countering atmospheric distortion in large telescopes and, er. . . giant lasers)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.