Insect-like Wide angle Lenses Are Introduced

Camera engineers are taking their cue from Mother Nature by designing a lens that scans the surrounding like insect’s compound eye. It is consisted of many very small lenses like what we could find in beetle, ant and fly. This allows the camera to take exceptional wide angle FoV at nearly 180 degrees with uniform illumination intensity and zero aberrations.

Standard camera lens mimic the inner working of human eye, an incoming beam of light passes through a lens, which focuses and bends it onto a retina. Eyes on mammals typically have far more limited field of view, but insects like flies enjoy expansive panoramic vision. The prototype lens has 180 miniature lenses and about 1.5 centimeters in diameter. As comparison, dragonflies have 28,000 miniature lenses occupying a much smaller space.