A miniature camera with no lenses to put eyes on all digital devices

Digital cameras with lenses can take great pictures, but it's hard to put them into smaller devices. Because the smaller the lens, the more difficult it is to make a precise surface. But Rambus's sensor research scientist Patrick Gill thought of a way to circumvent it, using spirals to capture and map light from all directions.
The top of the picture above is the image captured with this grating. This small, blurry picture is difficult to identify, but after the sensor's processor is identified, the target graphic becomes the middle image. Although it has a big difference in sharpness from the prototype (bottom), it doesn't stop us from seeing what it is: Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece-the Mona Lisa's smile.
What about the grating? Below this picture, the left side is the euro 5 cents coin, the right is the grating prototype. This intuitive comparison reveals that the grating is small in size. The size of the sensor behind the grating is even smaller, with a diameter of only 200 microns, less than a pencil head. In addition to the spiral, Rambus's laboratory also tried 10, five-angle, such as more than 28 kinds of diffraction shapes.

This camera supports the highest resolution of 128x128 pixels. But it's not about high-fidelity restores, it's about trying to capture the information you need at the lowest cost and easiest way--for example, for a number, you care about the numbers, not what fonts it uses.

The Rambus camera is not the only one in the study, but Gill that their technology has two advantages-one is less technical complexity and more miniaturization, and the other is similar to the CMOS technology commonly used in digital cameras, so that the corresponding chip production success is lower. Since the miniature camera solves the problem of miniaturization and cost, Gill envisages that it can be applied to all types of things from wearable devices to security systems and toys, with the aim of installing eyes on any size digital device.

It suddenly occurred to me that if artificial eyes could be popularized on a large scale to all non biological electronic objects, would artificial noses, artificial ears, and other biological organs be the same? If so, the boundary between biological and non-organisms seems to evolve into a philosophical proposition.