Скачать или смотреть Oil and water combined in lens technology

(30 Jan 2006)

1. Various of dew drops on branches and leaves
2. Various of woman taking photo with mobile phone
3. Set up of Bruno Berge, president of Varioptic, company that's developed liquid lens technology
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Bruno Berge, President of Varioptic
"It was a little bit by chance of course as usual in research, I was looking for something else, for some ways to increase the wet ability of water on a surface, which is a tricky subject, and I found out that electric fields could very easily control this wet ability. (to make a surface contain water more proficiently)"
5. Lens
6. Close up of hands holding lens
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Bruno Berge, President of Varioptic:
"It works very simply, you have in fact a transparent cell, you have two liquids, which are non miscible (can't be mixed), exactly like water and oil."
8. Graphic of enlarged image of a drop of water working inside lens and electric current is injected
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Bruno Berge, President of Varioptic:
"So we use the surface between oil and water as an optical surface, and we use electric fields to deform or to change the shape of this liquid interface."
10. Lens mounted onto a prototype mobile phone, onto an enlarged image sensor
11. Actual image sensor in real dimensions
12. Lens in operation, focusing onto a calendar picture, then shown onto a computer screen
13. Lines showing the auto-focus movements
14. Focusing on a pen on a sheet of graph paper, (reportedly one of the most difficult thing to focus on)
15. SOUNDBITE (English) John Barber, International Sales Manager for Varioptic:
"A liquid lens has no moving parts, it is just the change of shape of two liquids inside the lens which changes the focus, and with mobile phones ... they get a rough life, so having no moving parts is a major asset - the other systems are quite fragile. So all the mobile phone companies we talked to are very, very interested to have a lens which can change its focus but they think is very, very robust".
16. Various interiors of production facility for pilot line of lenses
17. SOUNDBITE (English) John Barber, International Sales Manager for Varioptic:
"There's a whole range of applications, it goes from mobile phones through web cams, to cars - there are increasing numbers of imaging systems going in cars - medical applications, endoscopes, toys, so there's a huge range of applications, anywhere there are small cameras, small optical systems, the liquid lens has major applications".
18. Close up of lens
19. Interior of labs preparing liquids for the lenses
20. Lens undergoing a test

SUGGESTED LEAD IN:

Mobile phones that double as cameras are not new.

But the technology behind the quality of the pictures is constantly developing.

One company in France is using oil and water to improve camera lenses - and it's turning out to be a winning combination.

VOICE OVER:

Morning sunrays shining through a dew drop.

Look closer and you can see every vein on the ivy leaf magnified by the water ... it is as if you were looking through a lens on a camera.

Now, this same concept is being adapted for mobile phone cameras - and while it seems like simple technology, the difficult part is trapping the lens-like properties of a water droplet so it works as an autofocus lens.

However, Varioptic, a company based in Lyon, France, has managed to do just that.

SOUNDBITE (English)
SUPER CAPTION: Bruno Berge, President of Varioptic

So how does it work?

SOUNDBITE (French)
SUPER CAPTION: Bruno Berge, President of Varioptic


SOUNDBITE (French)












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