Liquid Lens Can Magnify at the Flick of a Switch

An anonymous reader writes "German engineers have designed the first liquid camera lens with no moving parts that provides two levels of zoom. 'Liquid lenses bend light using the curved boundary between watery and oily liquids. When the two liquids are held in the right container, the boundary between them can be made to curve in a way that focuses light simply by applying a voltage. Liquid lenses have attracted much attention because they are potentially smaller than conventional optics and cheaper to build. Samsung has already built them into some cellphones.'"

Herbert used it in Dune in 1965...

[KokorHekkus]

Are there any earlier mentions of liquid lenses before Dune? The article links seems to think he was firtst. Even if there is, it's still a pretty nice catch by Frank Herbert.

Will you look at that thing! Stilgar whispered. Paul lay beside him in a slit of rock high on the shield wall rim, eye fixed to the collector of a Fremen telescope. The oil lens was focused on a starship lighter exposed by dawn in the basin below them. The tall eastern face of the ship glistened in the flat light of the sun, but the shadow side still showed yellow portholes from glowglobes of the night.

(ref. source http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=52 [technovelgy.com]

nearly on-topic: liquid crystal focussing

[c_jonescc]

This immediately reminded me of a talk I saw recently by Guoqiang Li from U. of Arizona. They're using liquid crystal lenses to make glasses with variable focusing power as a function of applied voltage. You could flip a switch to be able to see near or far - so if you're near-sighted but getting to the age where reading glasses would help, you're the touch of a button away.

Liquid zoom is quite cool too, but thought this related enough to pass on.

fyi:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/84/i15/8415lenses.htm l
(PNAS citation in article)

Re:Herbert used it in Dune in 1965...

[shrikel]

Except in Dune, the oil was suspended in a force field, allowing perfect (and perfectly adjustable) refraction. I've long wanted a telescope like that. No more recollimating my scope every time I take it somewhere out in the boonies over a bumpy dirt road!

with a technology like this...

[MorderVonAllem]

...could you somehow have a lens with multiple focus points? I'm thinking if you have 4 people in a picture you could focus on each of their faces with one lens and have a nice picture with everyone in focus rather than someone in the background a bit blurry.

Re:Hubble

[tedgyz]

Except, of course, that Hubble's MIRROR had spherical abberation and this is talking about lenses....

Ok, so fill the "lens" with Mercury. Work with me here.

A little earlier

[UtilityFog]

from here [microscopy-uk.org.uk]: In the Philosophical Transactions (Abridged), Volume 4, 1694-1702 pp. 97-101 + 1 plate, there is an article by Stephen Gray on "Microscopical Observations and Experiments" in which Mr. Gray explains the making of a water microscope.