14 DAY TRIAL // Insects are very interesting creatures, because of many reasons, but most of all due to how their eyes work. While most bugs have two eyes, these aren't normal. They are more like surfaces dotted with countless smaller eyes.
Dragonflies and praying mantises, for example, each have two bulbous ocular systems that give them a very wide field of view and great depth of field, plus the ability to anticipate movement to an extent.
Anticipating movements isn't something that researchers at the University of Illinois paid much attention to when they developed their latest camera system.
What they did seek to reproduce was the depth-of-field benefits. They have called this the "arthropodsuse compound design."
A bunch of small lenses work together and provide better overall coverage of whatever is being filmed.
"Nature has developed and refined these concepts over the course of billions of years of evolution," said lead researcher John A. Rogers.
"Full 180-degree fields of view with zero aberrations can only be accomplished with image sensors that adopt hemispherical layouts – much different than the planar CCD chips found in commercial cameras."
A large range of minuscule focusing lenses and detectors arranged in a hemisphere form the core of the new invention.
It took several years to build all the components, especially the rubbery optics necessary to make the hemispherical camera system. It wasn't easy to make it imitate the properties of an elastic band.
Unfortunately, despite the technology being demonstrated, there is no way to know when, if ever, it will be put into practice, or for what purposes, although we suppose the army is already considering hypothetical gains.
"A critical feature of our fly's eye cameras is that they incorporate integrated microlenses, photodetectors, and electronics on hemispherically curved surfaces," said Jianliang Xiao, coauthor of the study.
More coverage in the press release at the University of Illinois.
