Researchers at Princeton and the University of Washington have developed a tiny camera that can capture sharp and full-color images. To give you an idea of the size, this camera is too tiny and is the size of a grain of salt.
It is basically a half-millimeter-wide circle that contains 1.6 million cylinders. Each cylinder is designed to bend light in just the right way so that the array as a whole shapes the optical wavefront. After this, Signal processing uses the data to produce an image. Post-processing algorithms do most of the heavy lifting to offer a quality image from the tiny camera.
Researchers managed to capture 720 x 720 pixels full-color images using the sensor. The camera has a field of view of 40 degrees and an f-number of 2.
This tiny camera is also easy to manufacture and scale-up for production. This is made of silicon nitride. The nanostructures of the surface can be produced using deep ultraviolet lithography.
This tiny camera can be used for medical imaging in the body. It can also be used in tiny robot with a better camera. Researchers also claim that the tech can be used to turn anything into a camera by lining a surface with thousands of these sensors.
