Interesting, optical phased array. It's been done with microwaves for a long time now.
"Engineers have built a camera that does not need lenses to focus light. It can switch from a fish-eye to a telephoto lens instantaneously."
It's only an 8x8 element "proof of concept" array and resolution is a very long way from lensed cameras. If it were scaled up, advantages other than thinness is that it could be refocused and steered in any direction.
"Traditional cameras -- even those on the thinnest of cell phones -- cannot be truly flat due to their optics: lenses that require a certain shape and size in order to function. At Caltech, engineers have developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA). The OPA does computationally what lenses do using large pieces of glass: it manipulates incoming light to capture an image.
Lenses have a curve that bends the path of incoming light and focuses it onto a piece of film or, in the case of digital cameras, an image sensor. The OPA has a large array of light receivers, each of which can individually add a tightly controlled time delay (or phase shift) to the light it receives, enabling the camera to selectively look in different directions and focus on different things."
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Ultra-thin Camera Creates Images Without Lenses
Re: Ultra-thin camera creates images without lenses
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