Insect eye inspires future vision
An artificial insect eye that could be used in ultra-thin cameras has been developed by scientists in the US. The dimpled eye, contains over 8,500 hexagonal lenses packed into an area the size of a pinhead. The dome-shaped structure, described in the journal Science, is similar to a bee's eye. The researchers, from the University of California, Berkeley, say the work may also shed light on how insects developed such complex, visual systems. "Even though insects start with just a single cell, they grow and create this beautiful optical system by themselves," said Professor Luke Lee, one of the authors on the paper. "I wanted to understand how nature can create layer upon layer of perfectly ordered structures without expensive, fabrication technology," he said. As a result, the team of bioengineers came up with a relatively cheap and easy method for creating the artificial eyes that may in part mimic natural processes. Insect eyes, known as compound eyes, usually consist of hundreds of tiny lens-capped optical units, known as ommatidia. For example, a dragonfly has 30,000 of the structures in each eye. Individual ommatidia guide light through a lens and cone into a channel, known as a rhabdom, which contains light-sensitive cells. These are connected to optical, nerve cells to produce the image. The ommatidia are crammed side by side into bulges that create a wide field of view for the insect. As each unit is orientated in a slightly different direction, the honeycombed eye creates a mosaic image which, although low in resolution, is excellent at detecting movement. The team created the artificial eye by first creating a tiny, reusable mould with 8,700 indentations. The pock-marked hemisphere was then filled with an epoxy resin that reacts when exposed to ultraviolet light to create a harder material with different chemical properties. After being baked at a low temperature to set the material it can be extracted from the mould. Read more... This was seized 4 u at BBC News |
posted by steve at 4/28/2006 03:32:00 PM
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