Digital Home Thoughts: Inexpensive and Small Wide-Angle Lens

"South Korean researchers have designed and built an inexpensive optical lens that collects light from a large area and produces a virtually distortion-free wide-angle image. Standing in contrast to commonly known "fisheye" lenses, which produce significant amounts of visual distortion, low-distortion wide-angle lenses can potentially improve image-based applications such as security-camera systems and robot navigation. The new wide-angle lens is lighter, smaller and more affordable than commercially available "rectilinear" lenses, which also produce low-distortion views. The researchers present their new feat of optical technology in the Dec. 1 issue of Applied Optics, a publication of the Optical Society of America. Made of inexpensive components and available for little more than $100, the new wide-angle lens has been designed specifically to improve indoor security."



Most fisheye lenses distort images quite badly as you may all have noticed. And omni-directional cameras rely almost completely on software to clean up and stretch out images. A team of South Koreans, however, are claiming to have improved on bulky and expensive "rectilinear" lenses -- which offer up a low-distortion, wide-angle view -- by developing a lens that offers this clear view as well as being cheap, light, and small. I wonder how quickly this kind of technology would make it into consumer devices (photo and video cameras). Microsoft has already introduced their new RoundTable conferencing system so I am sure they would be interested in this technology.