Artificial Hyper Compound Eyes Enable Variable-Focus Imaging on both Curved and Flat Surfaces

Abstract

The artificial compound eye (ACE) with zoom imaging requires complex power sources. Meanwhile, its curved substrate makes it difficult for the ACE to realize the zoom imaging on flat surfaces. To realize a wide field of view and a zoom function on both curved and flat surfaces simultaneously, a novel ACE is proposed, which is a bionic design inspired by an ancient creature, trilobite. Compared with a dragonfly, photosensitive units of a trilobite's compound eye are composed of ommatidia with different focal lengths. By learning from this concept, an artificial hyper compound eye (AHCE) was fabricated. Its basic components are five microlenses with different curvatures, and they are capable of being treated as five ommatidia with different focal lengths. Five ommatidia form a photosensitive unit to realize a zoom function. AHCE is capable of variable-focus imaging on curved surfaces. With the information share function, we found that the AHCE not only images on curved surfaces but also has a zoom-imaging function on flat surfaces. The results confirm that the AHCE demonstrates an advanced imaging capability, a variable-focus imaging function on both curved and flat surfaces, which may open new opportunities in developing advanced micro-optical devices.

An Improved 3D OPC Method for the Fabrication of High-Fidelity Micro Fresnel Lenses

“…Recently, the flexibility of LDW-based free form grayscale mask design has attracted widespread attention and rapid development in the potential of three-dimensional (3D) microfabrication. Examples include customized micro-lens arrays (MLA) for wave-front sensing [5,6], virtual reality/augmented reality displays [7,8], super hydrophobic lenses for the humid outdoor environment [9], bionic compound eye lenses [10,11] for zoom imaging, Fresnel lenses for visual correction [12,13], Fresnel zone plates for lensless imaging [14,15], and achromatic lenses based on the Fresnel design [16][17][18][19]. All the integrated optical devices described above require collaborative optimization in design and manufacturing.…”