A team of Columbia University researchers is working on a prototype for a new thin, flexible sheet camera design, also referred to as a wallpaper camera, that could lead to the creation of a camera that can wrap around your car and offer a 360-degree view or be used as wallpaper to keep an eye on rooms outside of your own.
Although it's still in the prototype stage, the team says it has overcome numerous roadblocks that have hindered other researchers in their efforts to develop a similar product.
"We are exploring ways to capture visual information in unconventional ways," said Shree Nayar, a professor of computer science at Columbia University. "If you could spread a camera out like paper or cloth, with similar material properties as fabric or paper so you could wrap it around objects or car or a pole."
Nayar also believes that the technology could lead to the creation of a sheet camera the size of a credit card that can snap photos with one side and possess an image display on the other.
"If such cameras can be made at a low cost (ideally, like a roll of plastic sheet), they can be used to image the world in ways that would be difficult to achieve using one or more conventional cameras," the team said. "In the most general sense, such an imaging system would enable any surface in the real world to capture visual information."
The team has discovered a method of increasing the flexibility of the prototype without sacrificing the light-capturing ability in between the tiny sensors on the material as it bends. This has been a problem with previous sheet-sized imagers, which possessed sensors that were stiff and rigid.
"This undersampling or missing information produces bizarre artifacts," Nayar said. "You see things that were not there in the first place."
Using an adaptive lens array on flexible material that allows the focal length of each camera lens to change with the curvature of the sheet, Nayar and his team were able to solve this problem.
The team utilized silicone rubber, which they poured into the mold to build a base, followed by a flexible sheet for the array, avoiding the use of mechanical or electrical mechanisms for lens control.
"We have a design for this geometry, but also material properties that instill this optical adaptation property," Nayar said.
Although the prototype is not a camera yet, it is still a flexible design that projects images onto a camera, with the next step being to develop large-format detector arrays to integrate with the deformable lens array. Once these two technologies are combined, the team will have successfully created a flexible wallpaper camera.
