A high-quality camera lens is generally comprised of glass and in most cases, expensive and heavy to carry around.
In an effort to explore alternative lens options, while not comprising image quality, a team of U.S. researches has developed tiny metalenses which are made from thin, flat arrays of nanosized towers of titanium dioxide.
Giant glass-filled lenses are capable of rendering incredible pictures thanks to the curvature of the glass and how it, along with the camera’s digital sensor, interacts with incoming light.
The new metalenses are made from metamaterials capable of focusing light across the visible spectrum, ultimately enabling the materials to magnify images up to 170 times with the same high resolution as conventional state-of-the-art optics.
Seeing as how the tiny metalenses weigh almost nothing and are thinner than a human hair, many experts are labeling them as the future of smartphone cameras.
Once the technology gets perfected, look for theses metalenses to get mass produced, where they will eventually find their way into a DSLR and into your phone.
