News tagged with "research"

Engineers have developed a curved camera designed to mimic insects' compound eyes. The hemispherical design gives a wide field-of-view with no aberrations and effectively infinite depth-of-field, with the hope it could be used in applications such as endoscopy or as visual sensors on unmanned aircraft. The current design uses 180 light-sensitive elements, each behind its own lens, but researchers hope to build one with 20,000 elements, giving a similar resolution to that seen by dragonflies.

Scientists in Texas have demonstrated a way of 'painting' rechargeable lithium-ion batteries onto surfaces, greatly expanding the potential for future development of portable electronics. The team, from Rice University, has succeeded in painting batteries onto a range of different surfaces, including common household objects, with 'no surface conditioning'. The batteries are made up of five layers measuring just 0.5mm thick in total and, according to the scientists that developed the technology, can be fabricated using conventional spray-painting equipment and techniques.

A gigapixel camera developed for the US Department of Defense's research agency provides an insight into the challenges that will need to be overcome to offer super-high-resultion cameras. A team from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, has described its 960 megapixel (0.96 gigapixel) 'AWARE-2' camera in a letter to scientific journal Nature. The team says small, efficient electronics are the key to being able to miniaturize the camera, which currently sits in a 0.75 x 0.75 x 0.5m frame.

Scientists have successfully constructed a digital camera that can be flexed to focus an image, allowing its use with simple single-element lenses. Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign created a 16 x 16 pixel array on an elastomeric backing that can be distorted to correctly focus the image from a simple lens. In a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they combine this with a single-element, tunable lens to provide a camera with very simple optics capable of zooming. The technology could eventually provide 'studio quality' images from cellphone cameras, one of the lead researchers says.