An ultra thin yet powerful lens has been developed by engineers at UC San Diego which would be ideal for surveillance aircraft, cell phones and infrared night vision applications.

"Our imager is about seven times more powerful than a conventional lens of the same depth," said Eric Tremblay, the first author on an Applied Optics paper published February 1, 2007, and an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. candidate at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. Eric is working with Joseph Ford, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Jacobs School who leads the camera project within UCSD's Photonic Systems Integration Lab. Ford is also affiliated with the UCSD division of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, Calit2.

"This type of miniature camera is very promising for applications where you want high resolution images and a short exposure time. This describes what cell phone cameras want to be when they grow up," said Ford. "Today's cell phone cameras are pretty good for wide angle shots, but because space constraints require short focal length lenses, when you zoom them in, they're terrible. They're blurry, dark, and low contrast."

"Traditional camera lenses are typically made up of many different lens elements that work together to provide a sharp, high quality image. Here we did much the same thing, but the elements are folded on top of one another to reduce the thickness of the optic," said Tremblay. "Our 'folded lens' is not technically a lens, since it is reflective. I am guilty of calling it a lens sometimes, but I'm trying to control myself. 'Imager,' or 'folded optic' are more accurate." "The larger the number of folds in the imager, the more powerful it is," said Ford.

When asked about the likelihood of folded optics making their way into cell phone cameras, Tremblay said, "I don't know, but I'm hopeful. I think it's a good possibility." Picking up a domino-sized, next-next-generation prototype 5 times smaller than the disk shaped imager described in the Applied Optics paper, he said, "You can see how much smaller this has gotten already. It's going to keep shrinking."

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