Zooming in on lenses

The University of Central Florida has signed a licensing agreement with Holochip Corporation for a portfolio of technologies that will allow zoom lenses, such as those used in digital cameras and camera phones, to be made a lot smaller without compromising clarity.
 
Shin-Tson Wu, provost-distinguished professor of optics, and his research team at UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics, have developed and patented technologies in the field of adaptive lenses, some of which closely replicate the working of the human eye.

Holochip, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico and San Francisco, supplies such specialised lenses to manufacturers of camera phones, digital still cameras, medical and military equipment and other products. Under the agreement with the UCF Research Foundation, Holochip gains exclusive worldwide rights to Wu’s adaptive lens patents, including five US patents and numerous foreign applications.

Conventional zoom lenses rely on mechanically moving groups of glass or plastic lenses in order to adjust focus, magnification and field of view. Adaptive lenses, however, offer the ability to change focal lengths while eliminating the need to mechanically change the location of the lens. And it is all done in miniature. The typical aperture size for a lens in a cell phone, for example, is one to two millimetres in diameter.