Revolutionary Autofocus for Mobile Phones

The continuous tendency for gadget minimization or expansion is giving hard times to the world scientists, especially the ones working on the former.
Mobile device is one of the things that seem to be tending to zero nowadays, but the smarter a phone gets the harder it becomes to retain its diminutiveness. While reducing its dimensions, manufacturers strive for its enhancement, including the incessant zoom multiplication of camera.

It is quite hard, however, to evade the optical laws, and scientists of the world physicist community have been trying to solve the problem.

At last, a research group from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY, USA) came up with a non-mechanical zoom regulation.

A principle of magnetism of ferrofluids allows to replace the solid zoom construction with the so-called “liquid pumps”. The idea is that drops of ferrofluid interact with metallic nanoparticles that conduct electricity and, deforming in different directions, refract rays differently.

The size of the elements is trifling, so the width of the camera can now be reduced greatly. Furthermore, this technology can be used in microchip production and applied to medical research, too.

Now that the stumbling block in smartphone diminution has been moved we can expect a whole new leap in application development as well. iPhone designers , as well as developers for other platforms will no doubt appreciate the opportunities retrieved from this hardware progress.