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I'm glad somebody pointed this out! Meta materials and diffractive structures are not known for being low dispersion. This article mentions nothing about bandwi

I'm glad somebody pointed this out! Meta materials and diffractive structures are not known for being low dispersion. This article mentions nothing about bandwidth. However, I think the writer assumes that the indented reader knows this already. Also in the video you can see spatial ringing, which is highly indicative of coherent light (single wavelength, like in a laser.) This is still a cool discovery and could definitely have a lot of important applications, but it's important to clarify what this is, and what it isn't.

andi999 6y ago
Well you 'only'need 1 octave
andreareina 6y ago
Definitely very cool. Metamaterials in general are fascinating to me and when I was deep into photography optics was particularly interesting.
gus_massa 6y ago
In the video and the top image, the caption says > 3D artistic illustration of the wide-field-of-view metalens capturing a 180° panorama of MIT’s Killian Court and producing a high-resolution monochromatic flat image. My guess is that it is only good for monochromatic light.
- xoa 6y ago
  >My guess is that it is only good for monochromatic light. Does anyone know how much of a limitation that'd be in practice though? CCDs are monochromatic too, which we deal with using either Bayer filters (usually RGGB IIRC) or (in fancier high end stuff) a splitter prism leading to 3 separate CCDs. Modern computational photography is also increasingly able to do sensor fusion, even between different cameras. I can see how making use of this would still be an extra challenge in a small form factor, because normally the split/filter happens after the lens which simplifies things a lot. Having to do 3x multisensor fusion with meta material fisheye only definitely would be more effort and bulkier. Seems like it might still be pretty useful though depending on final cost? Otherwise maybe it'll end up niche, but it's really cool research anyway.
  - andreareina 6y ago
    CCDs aren't monochromatic though: they detect a wide band of frequencies, they just can't tell the difference. High dispersion in the lens is a problem because a blue photon and a red photon originating from the same spot on the same object, hitting the same spot on the lens, will be deflected to different spots on the CCD. This causes fringing and fuzziness in the image.

andi999 6y ago

Well you 'only'need 1 octave

andreareina 6y ago

Definitely very cool. Metamaterials in general are fascinating to me and when I was deep into photography optics was particularly interesting.

gus_massa 6y ago

In the video and the top image, the caption says > 3D artistic illustration of the wide-field-of-view metalens capturing a 180° panorama of MIT’s Killian Court and producing a high-resolution monochromatic flat image. My guess is that it is only good for monochromatic light.

xoa 6y ago
>My guess is that it is only good for monochromatic light. Does anyone know how much of a limitation that'd be in practice though? CCDs are monochromatic too, which we deal with using either Bayer filters (usually RGGB IIRC) or (in fancier high end stuff) a splitter prism leading to 3 separate CCDs. Modern computational photography is also increasingly able to do sensor fusion, even between different cameras. I can see how making use of this would still be an extra challenge in a small form factor, because normally the split/filter happens after the lens which simplifies things a lot. Having to do 3x multisensor fusion with meta material fisheye only definitely would be more effort and bulkier. Seems like it might still be pretty useful though depending on final cost? Otherwise maybe it'll end up niche, but it's really cool research anyway.
- andreareina 6y ago
  CCDs aren't monochromatic though: they detect a wide band of frequencies, they just can't tell the difference. High dispersion in the lens is a problem because a blue photon and a red photon originating from the same spot on the same object, hitting the same spot on the lens, will be deflected to different spots on the CCD. This causes fringing and fuzziness in the image.