U.S. Scientists Develop Eye-shaped Camera

CHICAGO (Reuters)- Borrowing one of nature’s best designs, U.S. scientists have built aneye-shaped camera using standard sensor materials and say it couldimprove the performance of digital cameras and enhance imaging of thehuman body.

The device might even lead to the development of prosthetic devices including a bionic eye, they said.

"This is the first time we’ve demonstrated a camera on a curvedsurface to really make it look like a human eye," said Yonggang Huangof Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who reported hisfindings on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Huang, who worked on the project with John Rogers of the Universityof Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed a relatively simple solutionto the long-running problem of transferring microelectronic componentsonto a curved surface without breaking them.

"If you simply bend it, those materials are brittle like a ceramic bowl. They break," Huang said in a telephone interview.

To solve this, Huang and Rogers developed a mesh-like material madeup of tiny squares that hold the photodetectors and electroniccomponents. The squares are connected by tiny wires that give eachcomponent the ability to mold to a curved surface.

IMPROVING THE FIELD OF VISION

"This approach allows us to put electronics in places where we couldn’t before," Rogers said in a statement.

With funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S.Department of Energy, Huang and Rogers built a digital camera that hasthe size, shape and layout of a human eye. Huang said the curved shapegreatly improves the field of vision, bringing the whole picture intofocus.

"Currently when you take photos, the middle part of the picture isvery clear but when you go to the edge, it is not so clear," Huangsaid. "The curved technology will make the entire picture clear."

But the applications extend beyond taking better vacation photos.

"It really extends to all of the electronics that we use on humans.You want to have a curved surface to fit the human body. That is reallythe place it can be used," he said.

Huang said the device could be used to make better imagingequipment, such as curved sensors to monitor brain activity that followthe contours of the brain. It could even be used in the development ofan artificial retina or a bionic eye.

"If you want to develop an eye to replace a human eye, certainly you want the shape to look like a human eye," he said.

"Right now we’ve already got a camera working. It works very wellwith computers. It’s just how to connect the camera to the brain. Thatis the issue to be solved," he said.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Xavier Briand)