A team of computer and electrical engineering researchers from the University of Utah have created an optical camera lens that is significantly lighter and thinner than its currently available counterparts built into smartphones.

Also capable of seeing in the dark, the new lens from the University of Utah is just a few microns thick versus standard camera lenses that are typically a couple of millimeters thick — for scale, that is roughly 1,000 times thinner than standard lenses or 20 times thinner than a strand of hair. Likewise, the Utah optical camera lens iteration is 100 times lighter.

Operationally, a traditional curved camera lens manipulates the light bouncing from objects before reaching the camera sensor responsible for forming a digital picture. Yet, the lens developed by the Utah team is composed of several microstructures, each of which manipulates the light toward the camera sensor.

The Utah team set out to make the lens flat, and thus thinner, than standard camera lenses. They devised a method for manufacturing the lens using polymers in combination with algorithms that determine the geometry of microstructures, wherein the microstructures function like the tiny pixels of a lens. Alone, these are not a lens, yet functioning together they behave as a lens. Due to the lens’ new design, manufacturing could also become less expensive as it will be possible to produce the lenses using plastic instead of glass.

Although newer smartphones already include highly sophisticated cameras that take high-quality images, their accompanying hardware — notably the thick camera lens that protrudes from the back of most phones — tends to interrupt an otherwise sleek design. As such, the developers of the new lens believe that the thinner and lighter lens design will eventually lead to sleeker smartphone designs.

The team also envisions that the lens will have applications for drones, making them lighter, which enables them to travel longer and farther. Equipped with the ability to see in the dark, the camera lenses could also be used by soldiers conducting night-time surveillance with improved night vision cameras.

The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.