Lots and lots of latest hi-tech gadgets are inspired by very natural ways of solving problems. Many researches find nature one of the best fields to borrow ideas and solutions from. Professor John Rogers, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is one who succeeded to adopt a human eye’s structures to a digital camera. There are pretty intricate innovations brought by Mr. Rogers and his development team, but they all seem to be working properly. Structure of the bionic camera is mostly similar to a common modern digital camera, but the introduced innovations allow an incomparable image quality.The primary feature that differs new camera from the others is how its array is carried out. The idea, once again, is taken form a natural way a human's eye is structured. Retina in the eye, that receives light, has a hemisphere shape. Array in any camera until now had a flat shape. Array and eye retina have same purpose against the final picture that is either sent to a human’s brain or to a camera’s display. The flat shape of array, in comparison with retina, is an obstacle that provides minor erosion to a pictured sight. The bionic eye camera has a hemisphere array so the focused light is received bypass all the losses. Of course there are special additional lenses to upgrade a flat array camera, but they aren't cheap and they are neither small, nor light. Quite the reverse with a curved array. It requires just one plain lens.
The main innovation of the eye-camera project is the array itself. A usual one can't be twisted into a hemisphere shape. It will lose all photodetectors, or pixels otherworldly, placed on it in the case. In order to prevent it, John Rodgers has designed a special silicon pixel plate. There is a wireframe embodied into it that actually caries all the pixels so they can be imparted to needed geometrical shape.This concept has recently been finished but yet in not an ultimate condition. The working prototype has a humble resolution of 256 pixels overall. More pixels, as the researchers confirm, is not a problem because all the modern technologies, which may differ from one digital camera to another, can be applied to a curved photodetector's geometry with a very small amount of changes. If so, and if such kind of technology wouldn't increase prices too much, than digital camera devices will step into another generation.
