Shiny new tech to advance cell phone cameras in the future! And the untold story is...

originally posted by: Bedlam
(part 4)

The far end of the rainbow here is a relatively new 3D ground imaging system that uses SAL as the starting point. You can actually return volumetric images of ground targets now, with resolutions down to 1mm voxels or so. That's a Northrop trick, and it also kicks ass. It's the difference between looking down and getting a flat photo and being able to pick a locale and get a 3D image of it, then being able to "walk through" the thing using either VR goggles or a big display you "grab" and "spin" around and "walk through" to get the viewpoint you want, sort of like playing Doom. Again, you don't get color, or surface marking, but you can easily tell what sort of car that is, or spot facial features which is something Lacrosse was bad at.

The data volume is immense. That's a limit. But you can use a tactical imager from a plane, sort of confine what you want to see, and get it a few seconds later.

That started happening about six years ago. It's still not fielded reliably, but it'll get there. That's the bleeding edge now.

So, how does this come back to cell phone camera lenses?

Well, as they say in north Georgia, where I come from, 'what goes around, comes around'.

They've® been going to more and more arcane methods of imagery, all of which are more and more technically fragile, slow, and difficult to field. And all these issues are due to diffraction limits in lensing/antenna systems, because lenses in the real world aren't perfect, since they have edges and aren't infinite.

You'd think that was sort of insurmountable. But, no!

You can make an infinite lens. And the way you do this is with a plasmonic metamaterial lens, like the one in the article.

Metamaterials are engineered to have quirky, non-real-world characteristics. You can make metamaterials that have impossible permeability and permittivity, which is hard to explain without math, but basically, I can make light in a metamaterial lens seem to go faster than light, or way slower than light, or be travelling the wrong way through the lens.

Metamaterial coatings for planes, for example, can be engineered to return negative Dopplers, or zero Dopplers - to one part of the radar, it looks like the plane is going backwards, to another, forwards, so the radar's filtering just edits out the plane as 'noise'. Crafty, eh?

The same way, I can make an optical lens that uses left-handed metamaterial characteristics that edit out the lens' edges. Think about that one. The lens can be designed using plasmonic metamaterial techniques in such a way that the lens will, to all intents and purposes, have an infinite aperture.

The diffraction limit goes away.

No processing. No number crunching. No real limits to volumes or areas of images caused by data flow problems. No non-optical image limits.

Now the limit to resolution is the lens design, and the CCD, and how perfectly you can fabricate that lens. Instead of detail resolution being limited by wavelength and aperture, it's limited by light input - tinier details become dimmer - you'd need a longer exposure. That has its own problems, so in practice there's a final limit there, but if you had a DANDY system, you probably COULD read someone's mail.

In addition, all the nifty features of the phone lens apply to this thing - variable focus, zoom, some neat filtering tricks. Only now it's on an NRO bird looking through your window seeing what sort of cereal you're eating.

RIght now, it's sort of lab-by. Hard to make, only works for monochromatic light, so you don't get full color photos, fragile. But it's the up and coming thing. Back to optical images, only now, without those pesky limitations. No tethers, no huge-ass Hubble sized KH birds. No telltale emissions.

As you see this sort of lens system proliferate into the consumer world, just remember - they're several years ahead of it at NRO.

You should work for Apple.

a reply to: thepixelpusher

Working for Uncle Sam indirectly is much more entertaining.

a reply to: Bedlam

Sounds like something the powers that be would want. I read that they can turn phones on when turned off and record conversations. From their perspective, being able to get a near HD photo of every one without their knowledge would be a boon to them.

Imagine what they could do with your phone camera if it was HD and had telephoto capability. screwing ones lady or bloke might not be so private anymore

Who knows, high def voice record over which the owner has no control might also appear in phones in the fullness of time.

originally posted by: Azureblue

Who knows, high def voice record over which the owner has no control might also appear in phones in the fullness of time.

Eh, you can definitely do it, but it generally takes a number of mics, and it helps you a LOT with the math if you know the positions of the mics in relation to each other.

Given a microphone array and enough DSP, you can do some aMAZing post processing. Far field microphones are da bomb.

Would it be possible to create what I call a "wave compression" lens that can covert other EM waves to visible light?

a reply to: TheKestrel04

It couldn't be passive, because reducing the wavelength requires an increase in energy.

originally posted by: Bedlam
a reply to: TheKestrel04

It couldn't be passive, because reducing the wavelength requires an increase in energy.

The reverse would be the same I assume?

Just over two years ago, PhD student at Swinburne’s Centre for Micro-Photonics, Xiaorui Zheng, tried fashioning a lens using graphene oxide — a variation of the super-strong, atom-thick carbon material, graphene. The team, led by Associate Professor Baohua Jia, developed a three-dimensional printer that could quickly and cheaply produce the lens using a sprayable graphene oxide solution. Lasers were used to precisely pattern the surface, creating three concentric rings of reduced graphene oxide, which enabled its extraordinary focus.

The result is a very strong and flexible flat optical lens that is 300 times thinner than a sheet of paper and weighs a microgram — next to nothing. At the same time, it has a precise and adjustable three-dimensional focus that allows a detailed view of objects as small as 200 nanometres long at wavelengths ranging from visible to near infrared.

Source: Swinburne.edu - Graphene aids lens technology breakthrough.

I got lasers and graphene! The gold metamaterial would be too difficult to mass produce. Graphene oxide is easy to produce and they just figured out how reduce the oxygen/oxide part to make reduced graphene oxide, like the article used, using microwaves. The article says they etched GO with lasers making concentric circles so if they can produce a sheet of graphene that will work in your cell phone... then you do not need gold nanorods. In the article they 3D printed the lens but creating a whole sheet of pristine graphene would be best. Cheaper is always better when it comes to mass production! Either way an optical revolution is around the corner!

The cameras have greatly advanced that now there is not even use of the Digital cameras, we dnt have extra baggage. Also there isnt a choice of getting a DSLR as now people who want a little taste of photography can use their expensive mobile phones' camera to shoot high photogenic quality pics,there are cheap mobiel phones with high Mp of camera - for more info check out call center philippines.

I'd love to know if this advanced camera tech will appear in our future iPhones?

originally posted by: thepixelpusher
I'd love to know if this advanced camera tech will appear in our future iPhones?

I heard it was on the Note 7

a reply to: interupt42

Guess that explains why they are blowing up. Tech not developed enough, or the energy waves blows the battery.

a reply to: Bedlam

So instead of needing an expensive DSLR (which will also probably get a lot smaller thanks to this new tech) all you need is an expensive smart phone? For those of us who can't afford new smart phones or DSLR's this changes nothing...

a reply to: djz3ro

Plenty of offers in the States to get reasonably priced iPhones. Is that not the case in Scotland? I'd check the refurbished items on Apples site or an Apple authorized refurb seller site.