Researchers have developed a remarkable new camera that can take sharp images without focusing and could define the future of smartphone photography. Considering how important cameras have become for smartphones, this breakthrough could have a huge impact on the design of future phone cameras.
Cameras have become such a key feature that phone brands are now at wide-angle cameras. However, this obsession with giving s as many options as possible has become a design problem with smartphones often launching with increasingly large and awkward rear camera set-ups. To create sharp, high quality images that are in-focus, cameras today rely on multiple lenses, in layers, and this contributes a lot to the size and heft of the gadgets.
That is why this invention of a thin, focus-free camera, reported by Phys.Org, could be a real game-changer for the smartphone industry. Developed by researchers at University of Utah, the camera uses a single super-thin lens making it possible to design cameras that are smaller and cheaper with greater functionality. Researchers explain that apart from smartphones cameras, this breakthrough could also help improve cameras in biomedical imaging systems, and enhance the capability of Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) - a key component in autonomous systems like self-driving cars.
Smartphone Camera Breakthrough
All of this might be possible thanks to the special super-thin flat lens that researchers have constructed using flat nano-structures instead of the usually bulky glass or plastic. The lens focuses all colors of light simultaneously, eliminating the need for multiple lenses to focus on multiple colors. The lens is also capable of maintaining sharp focus of objects that are as far apart as six meters. In contrast to traditional lenses which transform parallel light waves to spherical ones for converging on a focal point, the flat lens could achieve the same results by turning the incoming waves into others shapes. With this discovery, the researchers seem to have proved the textbooks wrong by discovering that there is more than one way light can be transmitted by an ideal lens. Long story short, this presents a large number of possibilities in future lenses and could drastically simplify camera design by eliminating the need for multiple lenses.
At time when smartphone designers are racking their brains trying to come up with an elegant solution for huge rear-camera setups, this new lens could prove to be instrumental. Leading the way to smaller phones that are still capable of providing consumers with the ability to take the quality and sharpness of images they have now come to expect.
Source: Phys.Org