By Chris Lee
August 08, 2008 - 09:16AM CT

The eyes in the living world are pretty amazing. Take the human eye: with a single lens, it achieves a huge effective field of view (around 120 degrees) with a resolution that might make your Nikon SLR turn in its CMOS chip. The reasons for this can be traced back to two simple features: the eye has a curved sensor surface, and it moves continually in tiny, angular steps.

Now, researchers have demonstrated the ability to replicate this in an electronic eye that holds the promise of delivering cheap, small, high-resolution cameras. The key to the technology is in the curved sensor surface. Normally, a single lens with a spherical surface will work best when it projects an image onto a spherical surface. However, most sensor surfaces are flat, resulting in distortions outside of the center of the image.

To overcome this, camera manufacturers use a system of lenses to flatten the projection, making the camera big and expensive. Given that the camera lens is already quite expensive, adding a higher resolution sensor—a sensor with a pixel size matched to the lens resolution is the optimum—has been the cheapest way to boost the resolution of your camera.

Making a curved sensor is not a simple business because the entire semiconductor industry is pretty much devoted to keeping things as flat as possible. A team of scientists from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have developed a method that uses normal processing technology to make a flat sensor and then deposits that onto a spherical surface.