Liquid Lens Can Magnify at the Flick of a Switch

An anonymous reader writes "German engineers have designed the first liquid camera lens with no moving parts that provides two levels of zoom. 'Liquid lenses bend light using the curved boundary between watery and oily liquids. When the two liquids are held in the right container, the boundary between them can be made to curve in a way that focuses light simply by applying a voltage. Liquid lenses have attracted much attention because they are potentially smaller than conventional optics and cheaper to build. Samsung has already built them into some cellphones.'"

Comments

Lens isn't working

[sconeu]

Nothing to see here. Move along.

This is old

[2.7182]

A guy did this at Bell Labs 2 years ago, and around the same time so did some French company that was going to put them in cell phones.

Re:This is old

[nick_davison]

"German engineers have designed the first... Samsung has already built them into some cellphones.'" Bell Labs aand Samsung used a time machine. It clearly says the German engineers have just done it first. The only possible explanation for Bell Labs doing it two years ago and Samsung having already built it in to cell phones is that they went forward in time in some kind of a time machine, possibly involving a flux capacitor of some sort, and brought the technology back with them to before it was first implemented.

That, or it's a badly phrased article.

In related news, German scientists have designed the first "circular device for the conveying of people and objects" and the first "source for the creation of heat and light by combustion of a 'fuel'." We may mock but the USPTO will still grant them a patent on the lot of it.

Re:This is old

[Anonymous Coward]

This is about liquid lenses with zoom capability, which is new.

Samsung etc. have had liquid lenses, but they haven't been able to do zoom. The German researchers found out how to make it work.
Hope that helps.

Shake It

[Joebert]

If I shake it before snapping a photo, do I get a really cool bubble-like effect ?

Herbert used it in Dune in 1965...

[KokorHekkus]

Are there any earlier mentions of liquid lenses before Dune? The article links seems to think he was firtst. Even if there is, it's still a pretty nice catch by Frank Herbert.

Will you look at that thing! Stilgar whispered. Paul lay beside him in a slit of rock high on the shield wall rim, eye fixed to the collector of a Fremen telescope. The oil lens was focused on a starship lighter exposed by dawn in the basin below them. The tall eastern face of the ship glistened in the flat light of the sun, but the shadow side still showed yellow portholes from glowglobes of the night.

(ref. source http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=52

Re:Herbert used it in Dune in 1965...

[pclminion]

Changing the shape of a lens doesn't adjust its refraction, it just... changes the shape of the lens. Refractivity is a property of the material, not the geometry of the lens.

nearly on-topic: liquid crystal focussing

[c_jonescc]

This immediately reminded me of a talk I saw recently by Guoqiang Li from U. of Arizona. They're using liquid crystal lenses to make glasses with variable focusing power as a function of applied voltage. You could flip a switch to be able to see near or far - so if you're near-sighted but getting to the age where reading glasses would help, you're the touch of a button away.

Liquid zoom is quite cool too, but thought this related enough to pass on.

fyi:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/84/i15/8415lenses.htm l
(PNAS citation in article)

Hubble

[tedgyz]

It sure would have made fixing the Hubble a lot easier.

Earth to Hubble: Adjust lens voltage to 1.537mV.

Seeing double??

[EmbeddedJanitor]

With better lenses we might see that this is a dup. These were reported in the media, and slashdot, a year or so back.

Re:with a technology like this...

[Achromatic1978]

Uhh, no need. You can do that with glass lenses. Its called depth-of-field, aperture, etc. The higher the f number, the deeper it is. Up the f, increase the depth of field, everyone is in focus (at the cost of decreased shutter speed - the f number is a ratio of 1/x of the diameter of the lens, so less light). Down the f number and you get nice portraits where only a small DOF exists and everything forward, or back, is out of focus.

Re:Great for Democracy

[Lorkki]

Then the police can keep policing the citizens, but the citizens can also police the police.

But if the police police police police, who will police the police police?