Popular expositions tend to use camera
as a metaphor to understand the functioning of eyes. Now let's turn the table
180 degrees: design a camera based on insect eyes.
Insects, along with the larger group
called arthropods (creatures with jointed legs including lobsters and such)
have compound eyes. Each eye is made of a large number of simpler units called
ommatidia arranged to form an approximately hemispherical surface. This gives a
larger field of vision - 160 to 180 degrees - high sensitivity to motion with
infinite depth of field. Try catching a housefly or swatting a mosquito on a hot
afternoon to appreciate the usefulness of such eyes to insects.
The inventors used recently developed
stretchable electronics. They arranged 256 tiny lenses on a 15 mm square
elastomer and molded it to a hemisphere to get a compound camera with 180 working
lenses! Deformable silicon photodetectors held together by filaments of metal
help to integrate the images with appropriate algorithms and computation. Cute,
isn't it?
But we still have a long way to go to
match the eyes of dragon flies - they have some 28,000 ommatidia in their
compound eyes!
Nature 497, 95–99 (2013) doi:10.1038/nature12083
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