Research promises Distortion-free snaps for camera phones

It’s a common phenomenon for camera phone users to tolerate disfigured and disproportional snaps. This common dysfunction has been around since beginning and is called funhouse-mirror distortion.

Well the days for this limitation are counted, and huge noses and leaning buildings could soon be over, if the recent revolutionary research from the University of Wisconsin is practically applied in camera phone production.

Professor Zhenqiang Ma and his team have evolved a flexible light-sensitive technique  using material that eliminates optical lens problems through extra thin strips of a specially fabricated nanomembrane made from extremely thin, flexible sheets of germanium.

Currently when a digital camera takes a snap, light goes through a lens and then focuses on a light-sensitive sensor. However, the lens has a limitation that when it bends the light and curves the focusing plane, the image becomes more distorted.

The costly digital cameras settle the problem through multiple glass panes which refract light and flatten the focusing plane to naturalize the image dimensions. However, such lens systems are large, bulky and expensive to the extent of being not viable.

Ma’s curved photodetector took its inspiration from the function of human eye to eliminate the problematic distortion. In the human eye, light enters though a single lens, but at the back of the eye, the image falls upon the curved retina, thus eliminating distortion.

The research is still on and more work needs to be done on curving the detectors but one can certainly anticipate a drastic revolution in phone photography.

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Tags: camera phone, Digital Cameras, flexible sheets, snap