The $42 lens could turn your smartphone or tablet camera into a power microscope.
Thomas Larson of Seattle has developed a Micro Phone Lens that attaches to your smartphone or tablet’s camera and offers a 150x magnification microscope.
The Micro Phone lens just sticks to your devices camera and can be pulled off when you’re done. Users just need to press on it to adjust the focus and use the default camera app. All you need is a light source and a microscope slide to view the things around in detail. The recommended camera resolution for the lens is 5MP and according to the site, the final product will be able to resolve features as tiny as 1.5-1.6 microns.
The project has raised money via the crowd funding site – Kickstarter. Larsen has already reached past his $50,000 goal through the site. The Micro Phone Lens is quite inexpensive as it comes for $42 only (which will get you the lens plus the full assortment of accessories). At this price the lens is a lot cheaper than dedicated microscopes with a comparable magnification which makes it ideal for home or school use.
Researchers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new ‘light-bending silicon chip’ that can turn your smartphone into a projector. The new chip eliminates the need of expensive and bulky lens used in traditional projectors. Ali Hajimiri and his team added that soon the technology would be incorporated into a smartphone to change it into a projector, with no need for a separate lens.
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Source: Kickstarter