A view shows the completed electronic eye camera, mounted on printed circuit board (green) for connection to a computer for image acquisition in this undated handout image. (Beckman Institute, University of Illinois/Handout/Reuters)

CHICAGO (Reuters) -
Borrowing one of nature's best designs,
U.S. scientists have built an eye-shaped camera using standard
sensor materials and say it could improve the performance of
digital cameras and enhance imaging of the human body.

The device might even lead to the development of prosthetic
devices including a bionic eye, they said.

“This is the first time we've demonstrated a camera on a
curved surface to really make it look like a human eye,” said
Yonggang Huang of Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois, who reported his findings on Wednesday in the journal
Nature.

Huang, who worked on the project with John Rogers of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed a
relatively simple solution to the long-running problem of
transferring microelectronic components onto a curved surface
without breaking them.

“If you simply bend it, those materials are brittle like a
ceramic bowl. They break,” Huang said in a telephone interview.

To solve this, Huang and Rogers developed a mesh-like
material made up of tiny squares that hold the photodetectors
and electronic components. The squares are connected by tiny
wires that give each component the ability to mold to a curved
surface.

IMPROVING THE FIELD OF VISION

“This approach allows us to put electronics in places where
we couldn't before,” Rogers said in a statement.

With funding from the National Science Foundation and the
U.S. Department of Energy, Huang and Rogers built a digital
camera that has the size, shape and layout of a human eye.
Huang said the curved shape greatly improves the field of
vision, bringing the whole picture into focus.

“Currently when you take photos, the middle part of the
picture is very clear but when you go to the edge, it is not so
clear,” Huang said. “The curved technology will make the entire
picture clear.”

But the applications extend beyond taking better vacation
photos.

“It really extends to all of the electronics that we use on
humans. You want to have a curved surface to fit the human
body. That is really the place it can be used,” he said.

Huang said the device could be used to make better imaging
equipment, such as curved sensors to monitor brain activity
that follow the contours of the brain. It could even be used in
the development of an artificial retina or a bionic eye.

“If you want to develop an eye to replace a human eye,
certainly you want the shape to look like a human eye,” he
said.

“Right now we've already got a camera working. It works
very well with computers. It's just how to connect the camera
to the brain. That is the issue to be solved,” he said.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Xavier Briand)