Whether you are an iPhone user, Huawei super-enthusiast, Samsung phone supporter or OnePlus worshipper, all of us can agree that camera blows – lumps in a phone’s case, where the camera is housed – are embarrassing.
They get hurt easily, stop you fabricating your phone flat on a diagram, and feel irritating when you are holding your phone in landscape. However, an explanation is in hand.
This solution arrives from the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, where an organization of researchers have just developed smartphone camera lenses that are almost a few micrometres thick.
If you do not know what a micrometre is, maybe this will lend you an idea: it is a millionth of a meter, implying these lenses are thousands of times tinier than those now in use in flagship phones – and twenty times less thin than a human hair.
These are decent camera smartphones.
This news was circulated in a scientific article titled “Broadband portable flat lenses for extended-wave infrared imaging”, which interprets a truly tiny optic lens.
It can fulfil all the purposes of a thicker phone lens by effectively creating several tiny hierarchies that bounce light to the detector, working together to behave as a lens.
A super-thin phone lens sounds tremendous, but how will this really transform your camera knowledge? We talked to Rajesh Menon, an electrical and computer engineering affiliate professor at the University of Utah, to adequately understand these small lenses.
The University of Utah researchers’ prototype lens was horizontal, but most phone lenses are rounded – the ‘central’ camera on a smartphone is generally a wide-angle lens. Generally, then, our initial question was about lenses.
Specifically, we inquired Menon if these micrometre lenses would arrive in various specifications – like ultra-wide angle, telephoto, macro, and else. The explanation was reasonable enough: “Yes, this is precisely what we do.”
