1,001 Cameras See In Gigapixels

The goal of reaching giga- or terapixels, says Brady, is currently being held back by the difficulty of designing a spherical lens that will not distort small areas of a scene. His idea is not only to modify the shape of the camera lens -- making it aspherical -- but to link together thousands of microcameras behind the main lens. Each of these cameras would have its own lens optimized for a small portion of the field of view.

"Now, when you use a camera, you're looking through a narrow soda straw," says Brady. "These new cameras will be able to capture the full view of human vision."

The final result of the three-year project should be a device about the size of a breadbox, though Brady hopes to scale the technology down to create a single-lens reflex camera with a resolution of 50 gigapixels.

Reference: Paper CWB2, "Multiscale Optical Systems" is at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14.

The latest technology in optics and lasers will be on display at the Optical Society's (OSA) Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO), which takes place Oct. 11-15 at the Fairmont San Jose Hotel and the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose, Calif.