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Inspired by prehistoric creatures, researchers make record-setting lenses

• sebmellen 5y ago
  > The camera can simultaneously image objects as close as 3 centimeters and as far away as 1.7 kilometers. Incredible. Lots of other cool biomimicry-related work available here: https://biomimicry.org/ https://biomimicry.org/.
• SemanticStrengh 5y ago
• bouvin 5y ago
  Neat, and I will never not think that trilobites are not cool animals. However, apart from the 'metamaterial' used for this bifocal lens, most of the range of the system is focused post-capture: "Without further processing, however, that would leave objects at intermediate distances (several meters from the camera) unfocused. Agrawal and his colleagues used a neural network—a computer algorithm that mimics the human nervous system—to teach software to recognize and correct for defects such as blurriness and color aberration in the objects that resided midway between the near and far focus of the metalens."
  • shusaku 5y ago
    I guess the question then is how much of the trilobites range also depends on its neural network
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  There's a handwavy mention in the article of "photonic technology", but they didn't describe any photonic technology. There's a fair bit of handwaviness, I think. Isn't the extent to which a light-beam is bent a function of the angle of incidence, and not of the amount of glass it has passed through?