For Sharpest Vision, LOOK LIKE A TRILOBITE!

While trilobites vanished from Earth 252 million years ago, they were hugely successful over the previous 269 million years. ey le behind a rich fossil record with many species sporting compound eyes, some with hundreds to thousands of lenses within a single eye. It was believed those lens arrays provided superb depthof-eld.

Now a team of Chinese and American researchers led by Qingbin Fan (Nanjing University) has proven this by building a “metalens” camera composed of millions of “nanopillars” inspired by the trilobite, particularly the species Dalmanitina socialis. As described in the journal Nature Communication, they constructed a “nanophotonic light-eld camera.” While trilobites may have gone the way of the dinosaurs, their legacy will live on.

e research team believes their technique will “aid the development of future high-performance imaging systems” with applications ranging from consumer photography to machine vision. To see into the future, look through the eyes of the past!