The mad scientists have done it again...playing god with the help of technology to create something so unsettling that it might as well have synthesized from a sci-fi movie. OK, it's not that bad. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have successfully built a digital camera that mimics the compound eye of an insect. Similar to an ant's eye where each photoreceptor of the ommatidia collects light and visual information, this camera consists of an array of 180 individual lenses that each takes an image and is then is then stitched together. Unlike normal cameras with flat sensors, the bug eye camera has a flexible hemispherical plane that offers both a 160 degree field of view and near-infinite depth of field. Even better, the image produced doesn't have severe distortions as it would with a normal extreme wide angle view since the shape of the camera is collectively round.
As of now, the technology is extremely limited and since each individual camera is only a pixel, it can only produce low resolution images...and of course there's no examples out on the web to share. In the future they plan on creating a compound eye that rivals a dragonfly's, which has about 28,000 optical units. As interesting as it sounds, this paves the way for a future of camera tech that could be equally good and bad. If science shows us that we can scale down a compound lens camera with higher resolution, this artificial bug eye could be useful medical procedures like endoscopy, and of course it would be an effective surveillance tool. There's already this irrational fear of tiny insect drones made by the government which is kind of half true...give them a camera like this and you might want to be weary of that fly on the wall. The future can be a scary thing.