Metasurface technology has made it possible to create a…

A team of engineers from the University of Washington has developed a new generation of metasurfaces that reveal a revolutionary small camera. This area is only 0.5 mm from the coast, like a grain of sand, but it produces an image of the same quality as conventional video cameras 500,000 times larger than it. Professional photographers do not find a fair amount of flaws in the novelty, but in case of repetition of this case.

The main difference between such cameras and conventional ones is that there is no lens system, and generally no moving mechanisms. They are replaced by an array of 1.6 million "nanoposts" - structures of a specific shape that convert light according to a given algorithm. The technology itself appeared a few years ago, but in the new structure of the version of nanoposts, a transformation was discovered using machine learning and deconvolution methods based on neural functions.

In addition to their small size, such cameras are good because they can be built directly into the design of any device as part of it, rather than a separate module. For example, turn the entire back panel of the smartphone into one large camera so that it can shoot video with any part of it. Or to equip the search robot with such a number of cameras that it continues to transmit a picture from the danger zone even when it is damaged and partially broken.