A fully planar fisheye lens developed by the MIT research team

MIT engineers and the University of Massachusetts Lowell Campus collaborated to develop a flat fisheye lens without the curved surface or curves of the existing ultra-wide angle lens. Fisheye lens is a relatively special lens that can cover a wide range of 180 degrees or more, but it is suitable for small cameras attached to smartphones because it is a heavy and large lens with high manufacturing cost.

It is difficult to take a pretty 180 degree panorama with a flat lens. Engineers are realizing this by adding a thin-sided glass wafer to precisely place a fine three-dimensional structure to scatter incident light like a curved glass. This time, it was specially designed for the infrared part of the light spectrum created by the research team, but it is said that it is also possible in visible light. Even in infrared or visible light, this technology can be used for a variety of purposes. If you can take a 180-degree panorama, it can also be used for medical imaging systems and computer vision apps where the range of image data interpretation is important.

This design can be an example of a lens called a meta lens. It is possible to create a lens that changes optical characteristics using a micro method in a way that could not be achieved with macro design changes until now, such as creating a lens that draws a curve on the outside and realizing vision by overlapping multiple glasses with different curvatures. Related information can be found here .