St3v3M Loc: 35,000 feet

These Tiny, Incredible ‘Metalenses’ are the Next Giant Leap in Optics
http://petapixel.com/2016/06/03/incredible-flat-metalenses-may-future-optics

Whuff Loc: Marshalltown, Iowa

Ain't technology wonderful? I'd like to come back in a hundred years to see where it's taken us.

Walt

GENorkus Loc: Washington Twp, Michigan

With all the newer tiny things coming, something like industrial espionage will be rampant and no one know.

GENorkus Loc: Washington Twp, Michigan

Duplicate post.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I read an article about that last night - amazing!

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

That is pretty incredible. I wonder just how close they are to making it work on a mass production level.

This also means I have to step up my activities in making a lensless camera. My aim is to use electromagnetism to focus an image onto a photosensitive material.
--Bob

forjava Loc: Half Moon Bay, CA

Article by unnamed author sounds like it was written by a child or a high-school cheerleader, except more naive. An example of the hype phase of "crossing the chasm."

Failure of the article 1: making it sound like it will be in production for everything tomorrow morning. Technology transfer normally begins in a niche and gradually encroaches, over a decade, if not 2-3 and originators fail to see all implications. For example, the article did not say much about optical errors such as diffraction, which could be inherent in the approach. These will have to be dealt with.

Failure of the article 2: the article's low-to-zero understanding of materials and lenses, that is, of everything covered. For example, the no-scattering claim for titanium dioxide. Its refractive index depends on the deposition process and it can be hugely scattering.

Please understand, I am commenting on the article, not the research.

To illustrate the multi-decade remark I have made above, I have a patent (

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,340,730.PN.&OS=PN/7,340,730&RS=PN/7,340,730 .

) -- I wrote this up in 2001 and built it in 2002 before mobile went viral and of course we had not foreseen that. This patent has been cited in many patents issued up to the present, as in Patent US20120159308 - Customization of Mobile Applications ... from 2012) and I am deriving a patent portfolio inspired by the 2002 proof of concept. Significant impact is still at least five years away. All kinds of stuff gets in the way of development, not to mention production. There's your two decades, easily.

In short, keep your SLR lenses.