Ultra-small 3D printing lens that helps machines have eyes like eagle

By mimicking the gestures of visual pits, scientists at the University of Stuttgart, Germany have helped machines with the ability to focus strongly on vision like an eagle.

In many respects, the human eye has nothing like a digital camera. Our eyes do not have a fixed number of frames or resolutions; nor consistent color reproduction, and we have great blind spots. However, these optical features - every organism is acquired - are the product of natural creation, and it has some benefits that scientists are trying to apply to the "eye " of machines.

Scientists at the University of Stuttgart in Germany are developing a 3D printing lens , each made of plastic and just as small as a grain of sand. Even so, this size is just a small corner of innovation coming from these geniuses. The breakthrough is that these lenses will capture the gesture of "fovea" , an indispensable physiological function of the human eye and the eagle, which allows the subject to process images more quickly.

"Visual hole" of machines.

Forvea in Vietnamese means visual hole, it looks like a hole in the back of your retina. It is the home of the light-receiving cells with dense density, which is also the default focus of sight. If you hold your hand out at the distance of an arm, the visual hole shows you only your hand area, which only accounts for about 2% of your entire vision.

This creates a focal point in our vision, and this part has a higher resolution than the others. It allows us to use our optical focusing ability when needed, more simply, you can clearly see an object if you pay attention to it. Not only the human eye but also the eagle's eyes operate in this way (their visual hole is deeper, thus giving a wider "high resolution" view).

By recreating eagle's eye mechanism by 3D printing out plastic lenses, scientists hope that they can create cameras that achieve faster and more accurate processing speeds. Furthermore, each lens has a very small size, which enables them to integrate this technology into ultra-small drones (eg bee robots) or medical and surgical tools that need to be deepened. inside the patient's body.

But nothing is perfect, this camera still has weaknesses. Including the production process, because 3D printing takes a lot of time, but this problem will soon be resolved once it is put into mass production. You can read the article about this technology in the Science Advances newspaper here.