Bionic Eye: Spy
August 9, 2008 – 7:04 pmesearchers have announced a technological development they say will improve the functionality of digital cameras and other imaging products. Yonggang Huang, a professor at Northwestern University, and John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a lens they said was inspired by the human eye.
In addition to enhancing digital camera technology, the eye-shaped lens could have an impact on many devices, Huang said.
“Camera technologies can benefit directly from these advances. We believe, more generally, that many new application possibilities will emerge from the ability to integrate … optoelectronic devices onto curved surfaces. Bring electronics to the human body in the form of advanced biomedical devices is one broad area of possible application,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Before the technology can be used in something like an optical prosthetic, however, other issues must also be resolved.
“We would like to explore the ability of these types of approaches for implantation into the human eye, for people who suffer from degeneration of the retina. Many other problems, mainly in the area of biocompatibility and bio-interfaces would need to be solved first, however,” Huang added.
Eye Opener
The two researchers spent two years investigating ways to develop approaches that would bypass the planar, 2-D constraints typically associated with conventional CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras, thereby enabling designs inspired by the human eye.
The result of their research is an array of silicon detectors and electronics that can be conformed onto a curved surface. That curved surface, much like the human eye, can serve as the focal plane array of the camera, which captures an image.
On a standard digital camera, these electronics have to lie on a flat surface. As a result, the camera’s lens system must reflect an image multiple times before it can reflect on the correct points on the focal plane.
The question Huang and Rogers confronted was how to place those electronics on a curved surface and still have a working camera. It’s a problem with which scientists have struggled over the past two decades. The electronics involved lie on silicon wafers, which can only be compressed 1 percent before they break and fail.
