Lens-Less Cameras Are Now A Thing

Cameras have evolved so much over the past few years. They began with the throwaway cameras you would take on field trips with you to capture 40 different moments, then they became digital with you buying a small block of metal and watching the screen light up as the lens zoomed out the body to focus. Now you don’t even use need to buy a camera,  they are built-in every smartphone and even pens and watches. The traditional drawback to these devices is the lenses that are used to focus on an image, but no more.

A professor of computer and electrical engineering at Rice University in Texas, Richard Baraniuk, believes that lenses are the only thing holding back cameras. To combat this, his team has developed a design based on a pinhole camera. The difficulty of pinhole cameras is they don’t allow for a lot of light, the solution to this problem appeared to be quite simple. Don’t use just one pinhole camera, use thousands.

The problem with a thousand different cameras, is a thousand different images are hard to use. So with a little modern logic, it’s not possible to produce a camera that is not only without a traditional lens but also slim and almost hidden.