A functional Camera the size of a grain of salt

[727Sky]

APPLIED OPTICS
2017 © The Authors,
some rights reserved;
exclusive licensee
American Association
for the Advancement
of Science. Distributed
under a Creative
Commons Attribution
NonCommercial
License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).
3D-printed eagle eye: Compound microlens system for
foveated imaging
Simon Thiele,
1
* Kathrin Arzenbacher,
1
Timo Gissibl,
2
Harald Giessen,
2
Alois M. Herkommer
1
We present a highly miniaturized camera, mimicking the natural vision of predators, by 3D-printing different multi-lens objectives directly onto a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor. Our system com-bines four printed doublet lenses with different focal lengths (equivalent tof= 31 to 123 mm for a 35-mm film) in a 2 × 2 arrangement to achieve a full field of view of 70° with an increasing angular resolution of up to 2 cycles/deg field of view in the center of the image. The footprint of the optics on the chip is below 300mm×300mm, whereas their height is <200mm. Because the four lenses are printed in one sinle step without the necessity for any further assembling or alignment, this approach allows for fast design iterations and can lead to a plethora of different miniaturized multi aperture imaging systems with applications in fields such as endoscopy, optical metrology, optical sensing, surveillance drones, or security.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/a...5.full.pdf

[DuckforcoveR]

Now THAT is cool. I like the part at the end where you get a good feeling about all of the wonderful possibilities:

can lead to a plethora of different miniaturized multi aperture imaging systems with applications in fields such as endoscopy, optical metrology, optical sensing

and then they punch you with:

surveillance drones, or security.

Everything is just getting too small. There was a guy who predicted this...

[727Sky]

A little connect the dots ? http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/17/mini-nuke...rfare.html