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Science

Tiny New Lenses, Smaller Than a Hair, Could Transform Phone and Drone Cameras (sciencedaily.com) 15

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Scientists have developed a new multi-layered metalens design that could revolutionize portable optics in devices like phones, drones, and satellites. By stacking metamaterial layers instead of relying on a single one, the team overcame fundamental limits in focusing multiple wavelengths of light. Their algorithm-driven approach produced intricate nanostructures shaped like clovers, propellers, and squares, enabling improved performance, scalability, and polarization independence. [...] Mr Joshua Jordaan, from the Research School of Physics at the Australian National University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS), said the ability to make metalenses to collect a lot of light will be a boon for future portable imaging systems. "The metalenses we have designed would be ideal for drones or earth-observation satellites, as we've tried to make them as small and light as possible," he said. The findings have been published in the journal Optics Express.

Tiny New Lenses, Smaller Than a Hair, Could Transform Phone and Drone Cameras More | Reply

Tiny New Lenses, Smaller Than a Hair, Could Transform Phone and Drone Cameras

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  • I dig the research into metamaterials [wikipedia.org], which definitely falls into the category of "weird stuff that's possible but makes my brain hurt". And I get that it's research - investigating new possibilities - with some hand-wavy possible use cases. Still: I would like it better if they had actually fabricated some of these lenses and provided test data. Can they actually be fabricated with known manufacturing processes? Does their performance hold up in practice compared to theory? What kind of real-world im
    • No, they cannot be fabricated today and probably not ever be fabricated with typical processes either. This is a what if we were able to make any arrangement physically possible kind of study. Similar types of meta materials have been actually made and studied physically and are fairly well understood so it probably stands to reason if it’s built it would function similarly to the simulation. It’s really cool from a miniature sensor perspective, but camera performance is based on many things

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Can they actually be fabricated with known manufacturing processes?

      Probably. The feature sizes for visible light tend to be in the range of the same lithography we use to make chips. See their references 3-5 for examples, including actual manufacturing.

      I would like it better if they had actually fabricated some of these lenses and provided test data.

      This is not how science works best. There are scientists who like to collect work over years or decades, turn it into a complete "story" and publish an uber pap

  • but is it practical? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @08:22AM (#65677810) Homepage Journal

    Like high speed photography, small lenses require a lot of light, and are useless without it. I wonder how practical something like this can be? At the very least they're going to need to be paired with some pretty high tech image sensors. Regardless, it also brings into question how high the resolution could practically go.

    Small, high res, low light, and fast shutter speed are all competing against each other, and you usually have to at least compromise on one (or two) to do well with the others. If you're starting out with a very small lens, there's going to be a lot of compromise going on, which will greatly limit the number of applications you can use it in.

    • There's been a lot of research on making better cameras, and cell phone cameras have been getting better. So whether this particular research makes it into production or not (which is beyond my ability to determine), it seems certain that some new research will actually make it into production and ten years from now we will have better cameras than now.

  • I can't make sense of all this shit and it seems this is a long way from production but....

    By intelligently designing these scattering elements, metalenses offer unparalleled subwavelength control over the polarization, amplitude, phase, and frequency of incident light [1]. This advanced control can drastically enhance the efficiency and compactness of next-generation optical systems

    I can certainly imagine that there could be interesting applications like DLSR type cameras that fit in a phone where white light is broken up by color and each color is read by an independent sensor.
    I can imagine there could be interesting AR and VR applications.
    Also applications for 3d and holographic displays.

    Could anyone more educated on the subject interject?

    • I can certainly imagine that there could be interesting applications like DLSR type cameras that fit in a phone

      Weird you went to actual cameras when I was thinking about medical diagnostic applications.

  • Have they re-invented the pinhole camera?

  • If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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