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Liquid Lens Can Magnify at the Flick of a Switch

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the zap-zoom dept.

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.'"

7 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Lens isn't working by sconeu · · Score: 4, Funny

    Nothing to see here. Move along.

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  2. Shake It by Joebert · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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    Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
  3. Herbert used it in Dune in 1965... by KokorHekkus · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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
  4. nearly on-topic: liquid crystal focussing by c_jonescc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

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    Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
  5. Seeing double?? by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  6. Re:This is old by nick_davison · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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.
  7. Re:This is old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.