Bio-inspired design is cool. Usually, we think about sophisticated contemporary organisms, such as bird, insect, and bat flight; extreme swimmers or runners; or gecko's feet.
We don't generally think about ancient, "primitive" life forms as models for cool high-tech stuff.
But, of course, ancient life was supremely well adapted to this planet.
This summer researchers from China and the US NIST report on an amazing light field camera that was inspired by the eyes of extinct Trilobites [1]. Trilobites are generally considered primitive sea creatures, though they thrived for over 200 million years, which is longer than mammals have been around, let along puny humans.
Inspired by what we know about Trilobite eyes, the design is simply awesome. The details go far beyond my own paltry understanding of optics, but I gather that the device has a forest of nanoscale pillars which "manipulate light in a variety of ways" [2].
In particular, these structures (which are about the size of the wavelength of visible light) separate right and left polarized photons from the scene, allowing the light to be focused both near and far. This is "The Trilobite Trick", so to speak.
Now, when the eye is focused on two distances, everything else is out of focus. But, hey, we've got neural networks (and Trilobites probably did, too), so we can clean things up. So—ta da!—one "metalens" simultaneously looking at everything!
As a matter of fact, we do want this in our phone!
It will be a while before these are widely available, but since this design is quite compatible with conventional CMOS chip production, there really is no reason it can't happen.
Cool!
OK, let's be candid here.
The real reason I was so interested in this was because Trilobite Eyes would be a great name for a band. In fact, the Spectrum article is a cornucopia of great band names.
So Many Great Band Names!
Trilobite Eyes
Metalens
Extreme Depth of Field
"Boasts Huge"
- Charles Q. Choi, Trilobite-Inspired Camera Boasts Huge Depth of Field, in IEEE Spectrum - Sensors, May 23, 2022. https://spectrum.ieee.org/metalens
- Qingbin Fan, Weizhu Xu, Xuemei Hu, Wenqi Zhu, Tao Yue, Cheng Zhang, Feng Yan, Lu Chen, Henri J. Lezec, Yanqing Lu, Amit Agrawal, and Ting Xu, Trilobite-inspired neural nanophotonic light-field camera with extreme depth-of-field. Nature Communications, 13 (1):2130, 2022/04/19 2022. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29568-y
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