Monday, September 03, 2012

Future flat lenses?

[Thanks to Tommy]

Future lenses may be just one ultra-flat and thin sheet, and may be free of the usual aberration which make glass lenses so complex to make.
(I'm not holding my breath though. Usually such optimistic Brave New World Of Coming Technology dreams are remarkably absent in the future they were supposed to arrive in.)


4 comments:

David Evans said...

They say they can tune it for different wavelengths of light by varying the size, angle and spacing of the microantennas. That suggests that, as it stands, it only works perfectly for light of one wavelength. Useful for some scientific applications, no doubt, not so much for everyday photography. Also I don't see how you would zoom it.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Right. It's probably very embryonic technology.

Russ said...

Usually such optimistic Brave New World Of Coming Technology dreams are remarkably absent in the future they were supposed to arrive in.

Yeah, I've been waiting for the jet-pack to hit the consumer market since I was 6! :D

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

'zacly. Flying cars too, have been "just around the corner" for 20 years or more.

I pretty much stopped reading Scientific American when after ten years I saw that I didn't see a single one of the amazing technologies I'd read about years ago hit the market yet.

Even when a tech is so mature that somebody is actually already trying to market it, it's a total crab shoot as to whether it will catch on. Like 20% chance or summin'.