K, this is nutso, future stuff here. Think of the possibilities.
“Now engineers at MIT and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell have designed a wide-angle lens that is completely flat. It is the first flat fisheye lens to produce crisp, 180-degree panoramic images. The design is a type of “metalens,” a wafer-thin material patterned with microscopic features that work together to manipulate light in a specific way.
In this case, the new fisheye lens consists of a single flat, millimeter-thin piece of glass covered on one side with tiny structures that precisely scatter incoming light to produce panoramic images, just as a conventional curved, multielement fisheye lens assembly would. The lens works in the infrared part of the spectrum, but the researchers say it could be modified to capture images using visible light as well.”
“In one demonstration, the new lens is tuned to operate in the mid-infrared region of the spectrum. The team used the imaging setup equipped with the metalens to snap pictures of a striped target. They then compared the quality of pictures taken at various angles across the scene, and found the new lens produced images of the stripes that were crisp and clear, even at the edges of the camera’s view, spanning nearly 180 degrees.