Can you imagine a lens just 0.1 millimetres wide? Well, a team of researchers from the University of Stuttgart made it reality using 3D printing #fotomagic
The lens was built layer by layer by the team, as traditional methods couldn’t make this minuscule camera happen. After just a few hours of design and manufacturing, the lens was ready to be tested. According to the team, it rendered “high optical performances and tremendous compactness”, focusing on images from a distance of 3 millimetres and transmitting them down the length of a 1.7-metre optical fibre.
This technology could be put to good use in medicine, as it could act as an endoscope. Doctors could see inside of the body, by simply injecting the patient with a syringe carrying the lens in the needle. Or miniature robots could carry one easily, as researchers put it: “The unprecedented flexibility of our method paves the way towards printed optical miniature instruments such as endoscopes, fibre-imaging systems for cell biology, new illumination systems, miniature optical fibre traps, integrated quantum emitters and detectors, and miniature drones and robots with autonomous vision.“
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