Researchers craft curved, eyelike electronic camera

Там же, на State of the Art:

The Eyes Have It: Another Tech Breakthrough?

— ссылка на заметку в Chicago Tribune:

Researchers craft curved, eyelike electronic camera

Drawing inspiration from the simple design of the human eye, Illinois engineers have invented a new kind of eyelike camera that avoids some pitfalls of ordinary cameras and could lead to a host of novel devices based on flexible electronics.

The electronic eye made by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University collects light on a curved screen resembling a retina, in contrast to digital cameras that use lenses to focus images on a flat sheet of light detectors. A curved surface reduces the need for multiple lenses and cuts down on distortion that comes from projecting the light on a flat surface.

That allows for a compact camera with low distortion and a wide field of view, much like a natural eye, according to a study published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature…

…To make the curved array of electronics, Rogers' team started with a small amount of elastic material in the shape of a dome. They stretched the elastic until it was taut and flat, then transferred the mesh of photodetectors to that flat surface. When they released the elastic, it snapped back to its curved shape with the electronics in place.

Such bending often breaks the brittle semiconductors in circuits, but the group overcame that by using very small photodetectors connected by thin wires on flexible plastic strips. Those tiny plastic bridges absorbed the strain of the change in shape, said study co-author Yonggang Huang, a professor of engineering at Northwestern.

The curved camera design makes it easier to get a good image across a given field of view, experts said. A normal digital camera tends to have the best image quality at the center of an image, with more distortion at the edges.

But the new design makes it possible to get sharp focus all the way to the edge of the image, without the need for fancy optics.

Bendable electronics would free camera designers to mimic other kinds of natural inventions, including "insect-like compound eyes" and fisheyes with a 360-degree field of view, wrote University of Tokyo electronics researcher Takao Someya in an accompanying editorial in Nature.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... 9933.story