Artificial compound eyes

Unlike mammals, whose two eyes each have a single lens that focuses images onto the retina, insects and crustaceans have compound eyes: curved surfaces packed with tens to thousands of individual optical units called ommatidia. Each ommatidium consists of a faceted lens that focuses light through a crystalline cone onto a waveguide called a rhabdom, which is formed inside photoreceptor cells. Compound eyes are highly sensitive to motion and, because each ommatidium can view a different angle, a fused image from all the ommatidia can produce a very wide-angle, high-resolution image. A team led by Luke Lee at the University of California, Berkeley, has now succeeded in making artificial compound eyes. The researchers start with a spherical array of microlenses fabricated by molding a photosensitive polymer to a microtemplate. Next, the researchers make self-aligned waveguides behind the lenses by using a condenser lens to spherically illuminate the microlens array with...