The lens is composed of flat, nanopatterned surfaces that can manipulate light. They eliminate the need for bulky and heavy lenses typically required for this type of imaging, which could enable wide-angle cameras to be incorporated into smartphones and portable imaging devices for vehicles such as cars or drones.
The new camera is just 0.3cm thick and can produce clear images of a scene with a viewing angle greater than 120°.
Wide-angle imaging is useful for capturing large amounts of information for photographs of vistas and other wide shots. For machine vision applications such as autonomous driving and drone-based surveillance, wide-angle imaging can enhance performance and safety, for example by revealing an obstacle you couldn’t otherwise see while backing up in a vehicle.
“To create an extremely compact wide-angle camera, we used an array of ‘metalenses’ that each capture certain parts of the wide-angle scene,” said lead researcher Tao Li. “The...