Artificial Eyeball

Extracted from the Article:
Mimicking the curves of a human retina has enabled a digital image sensor to take wide-angle pictures without distortion. This is possible thanks to an improved method of transferring silicon sensors onto a curved surface.

They built their hemispherical electronic eye by first using conventional photolithography to build silicon photodiodes 500 micrometers square and 1 micrometer thick. These were then wired into a flexible 16-by-16 array using chromium and gold.

Separately, they created a 1-cm-wide hemisphere out of a stretchy plastic, and stretched it into a flat surface. That stretched surface, or “drumhead”, was then pressed against the photodiode array.

The silicon squares stuck to the stretched plastic thanks to van der Waals forces, which was then allowed to spring back to its original hemispherical shape. As the array took its new form, the photodiodes packed together tightly and the connecting wires arced away from the surface, but the array was undamaged.

The reformed array was then glued to a curved glass surface, and a conventional lens attached. It now resembled a human eye in construction, with light entering the lens from the front, and passing to the curved “retina” containing the matrix of photodiodes behind.

[1] http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14477

Another angle,

Finally after taking few more shots ( to be honest, he had to wait till I take about 30 shots ), father and my self helped him to find the way out.

Have a look here to see all the images tagged as panorama in my gallery.

Things I had to do to make this possible

• Modify .htaccess files with some mod_rewrite rules in order to fake PTViewer that images are from my domain.

• Code changes to detect images tagged with “Panorama”, and show them using PTViewer.

Now i need an ADSL connection to upload my images to flickr. I don’t want Mobitel 3.5G to charge me for my image uploads.

Controls :

My first camera was Nikon Coolpix 5400 (and I still have it). My passion towards panoramas made me to buy the FC-E9 fish eye lens to this camera(along with the UR-E10 converter adapter).

It didn’t take much time to realize (or convince myself ) that I need more mega pixels and SLR features with better Glasses.

Since then I started buying and continued buying PHOTO GEAR…

Upto now I own the following.

• Cameras : Canon 20D body,  Nikon Coolpix 5400
• Lenses : Tamron SP AF 17-50mm F/2.8, Tamron AF 75-300mm, Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, Peleng 8mm Fisheye Lens (from Russia ), Kit lens, FC-E9 fisheye lens for Nikon Coolpix 5400.
• Tripod : Bogen-Manfrotto 725B Digi Tripod + Additional quick release plates.
• Panohead : Nodal Ninja 3
• Bags : Canon 200DG Bag, National Geographic Earth Explorer Shoulder Bag.
• Misc : Extra Batteries, Sandisk Extreme IV memory cards, Giottos Rocket Air Blaster, Nikon Lens Pen, Photo Jacket, Remote Trigger for 20D, More cleaning stuff etc..

Can’t wait till I own a famous Canon L series lenses. Wonder it will be Canon 100-400mm L (zoom) or Canon 400mm L (prime). Until then I will hang on to my faithful, Tamron 75-300mm zoom.

For the curious folks, I have installed FAlbum plugin to my existing WordPress MU installation.

The plugin should be installed in plugins directory (instead of mu-plugins directory) to make it work properly. Next create a page called ‘gallery’ (make sure you do this, otherwise you will waste few hours as I did) and configure the plugin to use <your site>/gallery as the path you will be showing the gallery under Navigation Root. If interested you can add this flickr widget to the side bar too.

Now it is time to add the Panoramas before I work on the boring site theme. Keep your fingers crossed !