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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.
I don't know about that one. I think I'll stick with glasses until they can make the LCDs (and power supplies) small enough to _not_ make me look any more like a frog than I already do.
I think a more realistic use would be for weapon sights and cameras.
What would LCD monitors use it for? It's you that focuses your eyes on them, not them that need to focus on you.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
"It's you that focuses your eyes on them, not them that need to focus on you."
In Soviet Russia, LCDs focus on you?
Seriously though:
Would there be no application to use LC Lenses in conjunction with a current LCD monitors to create a screen with depth through the use of lense trickery? I don't know oodles about optics or 3D technology, so maybe I misunderstand how it would work, but it seems to me that these changable lenses might be capable of providing a 3D monitor that doesn't require polarized glasses or some other filter.
Oh You POS
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?
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.
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.
If every pixel on the screen had its own lens that could throw the focus such that you'd have to focus either closer or farther, you could use the z-axis parameter in 3-d games (Half-life 2, for example) to render objects with different screen focus levels. It still wouldn't solve the problem of 3d, since both eyes would still perceive the same information - so there wouldn't be the overlap in view you would normally get from observing a real object, however you would get focal depth information.
What might be interesting is pairing this technology with 3D-goggles so you can finally combine the focus depth information with the overlap of two screens, for training applications.
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.