Researchers develop an artificial eye using a metalens and an artificial muscle

It seems like camera sensors, such as the ones used in digicams and cell phone cameras, improve each year. But the final image quality doesn’t just rest on the image sensors themselves. Another big contributor to the image quality from these types of cameras is none other than the camera lens.

Camera lenses are largely modeled from the natural lenses found in the eyes of humans – as well as other animal species, in some cases. Now a team of researchers has taken the standard lens concept and applied methods that effectively combined the worlds of semiconductor manufacturing and lens-making. As a result, they’ve created something they call an adaptive metalens, and it’s described as “essentially a flat, electronically controlled artificial eye.”

The researchers said that their adaptive metalens can simultaneously control three different major contributors to blurry images, namely astigmatism, focus, and image shift. The details of this new lensas well as the methods that they used to created it have been shared in a paper that was recently published in the journal Science Advances.