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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."
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.
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.