Smartphones fill so many rolls. Phone, camera, music player, calendar, calculator, email device, web browser. And microscope? Sure, throw that one onto the pile too. Researchers from UC Davis have built a cheap attachment for smartphone cameras, using the iPhone as a guinea pig, to do something that would normally be very expensive: magnify objects by up to 350 times.
In contrast to the hundreds or thousands of dollars microscopes can cost, UC Davis spent peanuts on its invention. At the heart of the camera attachment rests a 1mm ball lens, which you could buy for yourself for about $15.
The inventors at UC Davis attached a ball lens to the camera using a little black rubber as a mount and some old-fashioned double-sided tape to keep everything in place. A very small area brought into focus with the spherical lens magnifies objects down to a resolution of 1.5 mirons. The downside: a tiny lens equals a tiny field of view. The microscope can only focus on a 150 x 150 micron area before image processing is applied. With image processing, that area expands to 350 x 350 microns.
The ball lens naturally produces distortion, but image processing can deal with that issue and make this a viable microscope. Its creators see tons of potential within the education world; instead of spending thousands on microscopes for groups of students, schools could just let kids use their phones. Phone microscopes would be more mobile and user-friendly than the bulky full-size instruments--perfect for quick learning exercises with a variety of objects.
As these comparisons show, the 1mm ball lens does an impressive job. Not bad for a $15 add-on.
