Imaging technology is advancing at amazing speeds, with the phone in your pocket now able to take photos that rival large digital SLR cameras.
That advancement is about to get another huge leap, with a camera the size of a grain of salt able to take hi-res color images. The size is mind-bendingly small, and has implications of all kinds, from consumer products like glasses to medical imaging, and things we can’t even imagine yet.
Researchers at Princeton University and The University of Washington are the wizards behind the advancement, that involve metasurfaces, which are essentially nano-pillars of silicon arranged in a honeycomb pattern.
“Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume.”
A comparison of images taken by a previous tiny image sensor (left) and the team’s new metasurface sensor (right). Princeton University
Amazing new discovery, which we imagine will change imaging as we know it.
