Engineers Develop Thin, Lightweight Lens – Smartphone Game-changer?
Cameras have become such an key feature of smartphones in recent years. Sometimes it feels like they’re cameras with some a few extra useful features, like email and internet. The recent Apple release of the iPhone 11 range pushed the photography and cinematography capabilities more than ever before.
However, as smartphones reach the physical limit of what can be improved upon, most of the new advances come from AI and software developments. Recently, I wrote about the Semantic Rendering and Deep Fusion iPhone 11 Camera AI Software.
Now science might be about to take us another step forward. University of Utah electrical and computer engineering researchers have invented a completely new kind of optical lens technology. And this lens is much thinner and lighter than conventional camera lenses.
University of Utah say the lens “works with night imaging, a future boon for smartphones that could flatten those unsightly “camera bumps” as well as for drones and night vision cameras for soldiers.”
A Smartphone Lens measured in Microns
The team’s work is profiled in the latest edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is co-authored by Monjurul Meem, Sourangsu Banerji, Apratim Majumder, Rajesh Menon, Berardi Sensale Rodriguez, as well Fernando Guevara Vasquez.
According to Menon, while conventional lenses for smartphone cameras are a couple of millimeters thick, their new lens is only a few microns thick. This means lenses potentially a thousand times thinner than current lenses.
“Our lens is a hundred times lighter and a thousand times thinner, but the performance can be as good as conventional lenses,” says Menon.
Flat smartphone lenses
A conventional curved lens takes light that bounces off an object and bends it. The light then passes to the camera sensor which transmits the digital picture.
However, this new lens instead bends the light using many microstructures. These structures point the light in the correct direction on the way to the sensor.
The manufacture requires a new type of polymer and algorithms to calculate the geometry of the microstructures.
“You can think of these microstructures as very small pixels of a lens,” Menon explains. “They’re not a lens by themselves but all working together to act as a lens.”
The result is a lens that is flat instead of curved and more than 20 times thinner than a human hair. Added to that is the capability of thermal imaging. This new lens can see objects in the dark.
The team say this could ultimately produce smartphone cameras with no bump. But perhaps there is more to be done than simply making smaller lenses. This is purely my speculation, but one big reason we don’t have long shallow-depth-of-field creating lenses for smartphones is their size. Will this new tech allow such a lens to be included in a smartphone?
True, a DoF adapter can be added to our smartphones. But they are pretty expensive and add bulk to the smartphone which undermines the whole reason for using one in the first place.
Thermal imaging and Military
The team say the new lens could also give them the ability to take thermal imaging to look for heat signatures. A more immediate use for this technology would allow lighter military drones to fly longer. This would help out in night missions, mapping forest fires, or looking for victims of natural disasters. Plus, soldiers in the field could carry much lighter night vision cameras for longer durations.
Menon says this new lens could also be cheaper to manufacture because the design allows them to create them out of plastic instead of glass.
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