Saturday, November 01, 2008

Bug-eyed lens shrinks wide-angle cameras

Regardless of whether or not the design took place through a slow evolutionary process or a more immediate process, we should all be able to agree with the fact that nature is replete with examples of design. Here's another one.

"A prototype of a tiny bug-eyed camera that provides a field of view six times that of the conventional camera it’s designed to replace has been tested for the first time. The new system, called BugEye, is intended for use on missiles to keep track of targets but is also small enough to be used on endoscopes, giving an improved field of view in keyhole surgery...

Various teams have attempted to build smaller, lighter wide-angle cameras by copying the design of an insect’s eye. Previous attempts had one lens for each pixel of the camera’s sensor, but this limited the resolution, Laycock says."