New lens design could lead to slimmer smartphones, longer-flying drone

Researchers have developed a new lens design that could lead to slimmer smartphones and longer-flying drones. Researchers say they have developed a novel optical lens that is much thinner and lighter than conventional lenses. This could flatten the unsightly "camera bumps" in smartphones, leading to slimmer smartphones. What's more, scientists say, those lenses could also lead to longer-flying drones.

According to a new study published in journal PNAS, the new lens developed by scientists is only a few microns thick, or a thousand times thinner than conventional lenses for smartphone cameras that are a couple of millimetres thick

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"Our lens is a hundred times lighter and a thousand times thinner, but the performance can be as good as conventional lenses," said Rajesh Menon, an associate professor at the University of Utah in the US.

Reduces camera bump

Whereas a conventional curved lens takes the light that bounces off an object and bends it before it ultimately reaches the camera sensor forming the digital picture, the new lens has many microstructures, each bending the light in the correct direction at the sensor. The team of scientists has developed a fabrication process with a new type of polymer along with algorithms that can calculate the geometry of these microstructures.

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"You can think of these microstructures as very small pixels of a lens. They are not a lens by themselves but all working together to act as a lens," Menon said.

The result is a lens that is flat instead of curved and more than 20 times thinner than a human hair with the added capability of being used in thermal imaging to see objects in the dark, the researchers said. While this could ultimately produce smartphone cameras with no bump, it could also give them the ability to take thermal imaging to look for heat signatures, they said.

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However, more immediate use for this technology would allow lighter military drones to fly longer for night missions or to map forest fires or look for victims of natural disasters, the researchers noted. Soldiers in the field could carry much lighter night vision cameras for longer durations, they said.

Menon said this new lens could also be cheaper to manufacture because the design allows to create them out of plastic instead of glass.

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(With PTI inputs)