This futuristic camera lens is super tiny, totally flat, and relatively cheap

Harvard researchers have developed a novel, flat lens they say can focus "all the colors of the rainbow." This is a significant departure from the camera lenses made today, which are curved, bulkier, and take up more space.

But there's a catch: The researchers successfully focused light with this lens, which they call a "metalens," but on an extremely small, nanoparticle scale (nanoparticles can be thousands of times thinner than a human hair). While an impressive feat, major tech companies like Apple and Samsung aren't anywhere close to putting this technology into forthcoming phones and cameras.

This laboratory research was published on Monday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, and might one day allow cameras, phones, and VR headsets to incorporate larger lenses that take up less space. This could allow for devices to exploit this added room for other purposes -- like hardware and batteries -- or add larger lenses without requiring a larger, heavier device.

Some forms of visible light have long wavelengths (red) and other much shorter (blue). So to capture all these colors at once, cameras today use curved lenses to focus all the incoming light simultaneously to capture an image. This precise process has served us well for over a century, but these lenses inherently take up more space.

“Metalenses have advantages over traditional lenses,” Harvard physicist Federico Capasso, the study's senior author, said in a statement. “Metalenses are thin, easy to fabricate, and cost-effective. This breakthrough extends those advantages across the whole visible range of light. This is the next big step.”

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

These minuscule metalenses contain even smaller "nanofins," structures that control the speed of the different types of light as they enter the essentially flat lens.

In a statement, Harvard said they "licensed" this lens innovation "to a startup for commercial development." And back in their Harvard lab the researchers plan to do more work, scaling up their nanoparticle lens to something exponentially larger at one centimeter in diameter.

For now, this metalens may only exist in a microscopic world, but the researchers envision bigger things in the years ahead -- though how long remains uncertain.

"This brings us one step closer to the goal of incorporating them into common optical devices such as cameras,” said study co-author Alexander Zhu.