A team of bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley has created a series of artificial compound eyes.
“These eyes can eventually be used as cameras or sensory detectors to capture visual or chemical information from a wider field of vision than previously possible, even with the best fish-eye lens,” said Luke P Lee, the team’s principal investigator. Potential applications include surveillance, high-speed motion detection, and environmental sensing.
The ‘eyes’ are said to be the first, hemispherical, three-dimensional optical systems to integrate microlens arrays – thousands of tiny lenses packed side-by-side – with self aligned, self written waveguides (light-conducting channels that themselves have been created by beams of light).
A full report of the findings appears in the April 28 issue of the journal Science.
Like pins in a pincushion – or a dragonfly’s 30,000 ommatidia – the team’s artificial ommatidia are each oriented at a slightly different angle. While an insect’s ommatidia each end in a photoreceptor cell that transmits a light signal to the creature’s optic nerve, Lee plans to couple his with CCD photodiodes, the light-capturing units used in digital cameras and camcorders.
