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Ultra-thin lenses could eliminate the need for smartphone camera bumps

12 Oct

Protruding camera bumps like on the iPhone 11 Pro Max could soon be a thing of the past.

Smartphone cameras have been improved a lot over recent years and while many improvements are down to software and image processing, hardware also plays a big part. Sensor sizes have been increased, lenses have become faster and optical tele lenses offer better zoom performance.

However, there’s also a drawback to these developments. Due to the laws of physics, faster and longer lenses, especially when combined with larger sensors, take up more space in a device. Combined with the device designers’ obsession with ultra-thin bodies this resulted in many devices coming with unsightly ‘camera bumps’ that protrude from otherwise perfectly smooth smartphone housings.

Those bumps could soon be a thing of the past, though. A research team at the University of Utah has developed a super-thin camera lens that would easily fit even in the thinnest smartphone body.

Current lenses are, depending on lens type and sensor size of the camera, a few millimeters thick. The new lens type is only a few microns thick, that’s about a thousand times thinner than current smartphone lenses. They are also one hundred times lighter.

Flat lens developed by researchers at the University of Utah, photo: Dan Hixson/University of Utah College of Engineering

The method the researchers have used to make this possible has been detailed in a research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The new lenses are flat and consist of a large number of microstructures, each bending the light towards the sensor rather than just one single piece. As part of the project the team also developed a fabrication process using a new type of polymer and algorithms than can calculate the exact geometry required for these microstructures.

‘You can think of these microstructures as very small pixels of a lens,’ says Rajesh Menon, one of the co-authors of the project, ‘They’re not a lens by themselves but all working together to act as a lens.’

According to the scientists, the new lens type could also help give smartphones thermal imaging capabilities as well as design more lightweight military drones that could fly longer and lighter night vision cameras for soldiers in the field.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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How to Make a DIY Lens Hood to Eliminate Lens Flare

12 Oct

Not all lenses come with lens hoods, and that can mean you can suffer the effects of lens flare. This occurs when light is scattered across the glass elements of a lens, often caused by bright sunlight at a particular angle, and it produces coloured spots around your image. Lens hoods shade the lens, almost entirely stopping lens flare in the majority of situations.

Sometimes this can be used to creative effect, but for the majority of the time you’re going to want to get rid of it. Building your own DIY lens hood is a way around this problem, and this 2-minute tutorial from COOPH shows you how to do just that.

By recycling an old plastic bottle, whilst using some black spray paint, you can create your own “foldable” lens hood to work with whatever lens you need.

For more tips about handling lens flare, check out some of our tutorials:

How to use Lens Flare to Your Advantage
5 Tips for Achieving Artistic Lens Flare: How To
How to Prevent Lens Flare
How to Eliminate Lens Flare

The post How to Make a DIY Lens Hood to Eliminate Lens Flare appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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Water You Can Eat: Edible Drink Bubbles Aim to Eliminate Plastic Bottle Waste

09 Jul

[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Products & Packaging. ]

So far so good: the creators of these edible water balls have begun deploying them at large-scale festivals, the kinds of places where hundreds of disposable plastic bottles are used and trashed. But while this type of innovation bodes well for the future of biodegradable design, there are still some flaws to be sorted out before it can begin to seriously tackle the big problem: 35 billion plastic water bottles tossed in the garbage every year.

Ooho!’s solution is pretty simple and ingenious: drop frozen balls of water (or other beverages) into a (thankfully) tasteless solution that forms a gelatinous layer around the outside. Once the ice melts, drinkers can pick up and pop a gulp, or if that seems too strange: puncture the membrane (which then biodegrades in weeks) and drink from it. Made of seaweed, the “container” layer can also be colored and flavored.

Between crowdfunders and other backers, they have a lot of funding behind them, and “the team at Skipping Rocks Lab—made up of chemists, engineers, designers and business advisors–are continuing to pioneer the use of seaweed in other packaging uses, with a mission to become the leading global producer of seaweed-based packaging.”

The whole process uses a lot less energy than normal bottles require, but does it serve to replace them? In pop-up settings, like festivals and sporting events, it could — especially if the machinery used to make them can be made mobile. But for ordinary everyday use the problem is trickier — the membranes are delicate and would pop if tossed into bags or pockets.

Still, the science is worth pursuing: the same method could be expanded to make more robust and larger frameworks (better analogs for ordinary bottles). And the technology could be improved to, made to create and dispense water balls on a more mobile and automatic basis in public-event settings (e.g. ball-vending machines). For now, it isn’t the invention to end plastic bottles some might hope, but it is a step in the right direction and — at least in limited contexts — makes for a sustainable drinking alternative.