Cameras that used to require an entire team of people to carry around now fit snugly inside your nearest pocket, along with a slew of other technologies that are now made exceedingly portable. These modern developments in technology have since impacted our lives in various ways, and are a testament to just how far the best of us can explore what we have yet to learn.
And what better way to demonstrate just how far our experts are willing to go to expand our technological prowess by the new camera technology developed by researchers from Princeton University. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, gives us a glimpse into a future where any surface can become a camera if we wanted them to be, as their novel camera technology is barely the size of a grain of sand, sitting at just 0.5 mm wide.
The super-small camera is actually composed of 1.6 million tiny cylinders, each carefully designed and placed to bend light in a way that allows an image to form. The resulting data from the miniscule lens is then sent to a signal processing algorithm, which then churns out a roughly 720 x 720 pixel image that’s in full color—a true feat, considering the entire array is arranged in a circle that’s only some 0.5 mm in diameter.
The device is capable of capturing light within the wavelengths of 400 and 700 nm, and is said to have a field of view of 40°. According to the research team, co-led by Princeton researchers Ethan Tseng and Shane Colburn, their novel device is capable of capturing images with the same quality as other standard compound sensors that are about 500,000x its size.
“It’s been a challenge to design and configure these little microstructures to do what you want,” said Tseng, a computer science Ph.D. student. “For this specific task of capturing large field-of-view […] images, it was previously unclear how to co-design the millions of nano-structures together with post-processing algorithms.”
Experts also regard the study as the first-ever use of a “surface optical technology” out front via the device’s surface, which also takes advantage of the improvements made by neural-based processing at the back end—a combined system the authors called “neural nano-optics.”
Meanwhile, the device itself is made of silicon nitride (Si3N4), which was given its millions of tiny cylindrical holes through a process called deep ultraviolet lithography; the same process is also in constant use in the semiconductor industry, which produces all the components that form the backbone of our current technological age.
The team responsible for this landmark achievement see their new potential device in constant use in medical imaging, allowing for even more non-invasive procedures that provide a glimpse into the inner workings of patients. They also see these devices as being capable of replacing the camera array that’s perhaps behind the phone you’re reading this article on right now—but not without even more updates and developments to their current product, of course.
According to senior author Felix Heide: “We could turn individual surfaces into cameras that have ultra-high resolution, so you wouldn’t need three cameras on the back of your phone anymore, but the whole back of your phone would become one giant camera. We can think of completely different ways to build devices in the future.”
(Check out our coverage on other radical innovations in the field of novel technology, such as the potential use of “quantum” sensors for navigation, as well as little power harvesters that manage to take energy from excess Wi-Fi signals.)
References
- Irving, M. (2021, November 30). Tiny salt-grain-sized camera snaps hi-res full-color images. New Atlas. https://newatlas.com/photography/tiny-metasurface-camera/
- Sharlach, M. (2021, November 29). Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain. Princeton University. https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2021/11/29/researchers-shrink-camera-size-salt-grain
- Tseng, E., Colburn, S., Whitehead, J., Huang, L., Baek, S.-H., Majumdar, A., & Heide, F. (2021). Neural nano-optics for high-quality thin lens imaging. Nature Communications, 12(1), 6493. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26443-0
