Engineers create a paper-thin camera with no lens

With the world now excelling in technology, a team of engineers have successfully manufactured a tiny, paper-thin camera that works without the use of lenses.

The engineers replaced curved glass with ultra-thin optical phased array, which contains a group of light recievers that adds a minute delay to light as it is captured. This in turn, permits the camera to switch focus and to look in various directions with the use of electronic trickery only.

While describing the new camera, the principal investigator Ali Hajimiri from Caltech explained, "Here, like most other things in life, timing is everything. With our new system, you can selectively look in a desired direction and at a very small part of the picture in front of you at any given time, by controlling the timing with femto-second – quadrillionth of a second – precision."

The camera, which is square in shape, measuring only 0.04 inches by 0.05 inches, contains the ability to switch its 'aperture' among wide angle, fish eye and zoom instantaneously. Also, due to the thinness of the camera (only a few microns as compared to a human hair which is almost 100 microns thin on an avergae), the camera could be embedded almost anywhere including a watch, eyeglasses or fabric, informed Live Science.

The innovative camera is created using thin light sensitive silicon components that are integrated on a silicon chip. As Fox News reports, the light waves are recieved by every light sensitive element in the array and interferes destructively from one of the directions. In that particular direction, the waves amplify each other for creating a focused gaze which could be controlled electronically.

Within seconds, the light receivers could be manipulated for generating an image of an object which can be anywhere; far light, right or in between. This is possible without even pointing the camera at the objects. "The beauty of this thing is that we create images without any mechanical movement," expressed Hajimiri.

He added, "There's no fundamental limit on how much you could increase the resolution. You could do gigapixels if you wanted."

Reza Fatemi, the principal researcher exclaimed, "What the camera does is similar to looking through a thin straw and scanning it across the field of view. We can form an image at an incredibly fast speed by manipulating the light instead of moving a mechanical object."

Moreover, the camera contains 64 light recievers in an 8x8 pixel array. Also, the pictures generated by this camera are actually far more better than those generated by our smart phones, as states their research published in OSA Technical Digest. "The entire backside of your phone could be a camera," said Hajimiri.

"The applications are endless. Even in today's smartphones, the camera is the component that limits how thin your phone can get. Once scaled up, this technology can make lenses and thick cameras obsolete," claimed another researcher Behrooz Abiri.

Hajimiri concluded, "The ability to control all the optical properties of a camera electronically using a paper-thin layer of low-cost silicon photonics without any mechanical movement, lenses, or mirrors, opens a new world of imagers that could look like wallpaper, blinds, or even wearable fabric."