Philips' New Camera Lens Works Like Human Eye

[ayoub_ibrahim]

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Philips Electronics said on Thursday it had invented a tiny digital camera lens to fit inside a mobile phone that could focus on objects and create sharp pictures in ways that are similar to the human eye.
Unlike high-end digital cameras, the new lens does not require mechanical moving parts because it works by manipulating two fluids in a tiny transparent tube.

Philips said it will build a production line for the three millimeter lenses that are aimed at low-cost imaging products, such as digital cameras that fit inside a mobile phone or a home security system.

By charging the sides of the tube with an small electric current, one of the two fluids is drawn to the edges while the other fluid fills up the remaining space in the tube. The place where the two fluids meet, functions like a lens.

By changing the current, this lens can be shaped hollow, curvex or anything in between, so that it can focus on objects far away or as close as five centimeters.

The lens, on show at the CeBIT electronic trade fair in Hanover, Germany in two weeks time, is the first of its kind and the technology has been patented, Philips said.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3TV4SDEYY4HCMCRBAEZSFEY?type=technologyNews&storyID=4499702&section=news

[VJ]

And here is some additional technological info:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0403/04030302philipsfluidlens.asp

Jörg

[Fat Tone]

Nice. Could it be scaled up for larger digital cameras, and would you want to?

[az]

I don't think it could be scaled up very well (what with gravity and all), but it might be a neat idea for something hubble-like.

AZ

[TransformX]

Man, how far are we from a bionic eye now ?

[Fat Tone]

It may zoom, but could it do the k..k..k..k.. noise

[Greebe]

Would ONLY work for very small lenses... and is NOT like the human eye.

[Wulfman]

Originally posted by Greebe
Would ONLY work for very small lenses... and is NOT like the human eye.

I just imagined the lens in my eye getting concave... woah!

mfg
wulfman

[Marshmallowman]

But it would be small enough to fit the entire mechanism and some extra electonice inside a "glass eye".

All they have to work out now is a good nerve /electronic interface, not having a eye would not be nice but if you could have a glowing red termintor eye that would be a small consolation.

However if you made a small camera as a "glass eye" that would be a pretty neato spy toy in itself

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Originally posted by Wulfman
I just imagined the lens in my eye getting concave... woah!

mfg
wulfman

exactly same thought here after reading seeing that diagram in the article

[Fat Tone]

Originally posted by Marshmallowman
But it would be small enough to fit the entire mechanism and some extra electonice inside a "glass eye".

All they have to work out now is a good nerve /electronic interface, not having a eye would not be nice but if you could have a glowing red termintor eye that would be a small consolation.

However if you made a small camera as a "glass eye" that would be a pretty neato spy toy in itself

The only problem there is the optic nerve interface. Last I heard (and admittedly it was a long time ago) there had been success with a fairly small grid-array of dots, maybe 8x8 points.

[az]

4x4 was demonstrated recently, but they're confident they are able to go up (of course they can). Patients were able to recognize very big letters with the 4x4.

32x32 would be needed at least to give something really useful (That's really much less than I imagined - our brain is a really amazing image processor!).

AZ

[Technoid]

Give it time, I suspect we'll have 1024*1024 soon™

[TransformX]

32x32 is the size on windows icons AFAIK...

[MultimediaMan]

TransformX: They are referring to the number of points that are physically laid down on someone's optic nerve, or in some cases in a pattern directly on an area of the brain. No one really knows what kind of "resolution" the physical dots are capable of: At my last hearing they were using electrical pulses several times higher than naturally-occurring biochemical reactions. Long Term study on the effects of these (comparitively) high-powered impulses was only then beginning.

I've been following Eye Reconstruction/ Restoration research for 19 years (Since I lost my right eye - twenty years ago this coming December): I doubt by the time my Grandkids are born, Doctors will have a reliable method for repairing eyes. That said, I do believe that they will eventually perfect a method.

[rant] I am still shocked that the FDA allowed Corneal alterations for the sake of cosmetics: Most people undergoing these procedures lose some fine detail perception and "gain" a certain degree of night-blindness/photophobia after Lasik or other procedures. I realize that for some extreme cases, Lasik is required before glasses can even be proscribed. But after reading the statistics, Doctors will be responsible for blinding more people than construction accidents in a few years if things do not improve dramatically. [/rant]

Cloning seems to offer the best hope as things are now for people who have lost their sight. But for people who have never had sight, the Grid Interface is a fantastic area of study.

However, I must point out that teaching the blind how to "see" is no mean feat: Hell, making the transition from Binocular to Monocular vision took me about 8 years - I'm not talking daily "therapy" it just took that long to accumulate enough life experience to know how to deal with some types of visually-challenging situations that a binocular person wouldn't even think about. At the time this happened (1984) they just discharged you from the Hospital, nowadays there is a 6-8 week course offered as an outpatient course covering things to lookout (literally) for. Somethings were easier to re-learn than others, some things can never be done again in a meaningful way: I can read, write, draw, drive, play some type of sports (forget anything with an airborne ball, though - fast moving objects in 3 dimensions with no frame of reference are nigh-well impossible to catch for a one-eyed person), ironically, my shooting actually improved - popular myth is that you need depth perception to judge range: the fact is, even trained observers have difficulty determining Range past a couple of hundred yards without instruments of some kind.

Needless to say, those VR 3D Goggles and 3D Glasses just don't do it for me. Imax is pretty good, though.