Bionic Eye with Gallium Nerves

If machines or vehicles want to visually perceive their surroundings, they have to resort to sensors that fall far short of the performance of the human eye. There was nothing comparable for the arrangement of a lens and shell-shaped visual sticks in a sphere body. Scientists at Hong Kong University of Science of Technology have now successfully tested for the first time a sensor that mimics the human eye in these essential features: the bionic eye is a sphere body filled with a liquid, has a lens as a pupil at the front, and is densely packed with photosensors at the back. Their “optic nerves” are connected to a computer and consist of a gallium-indium alloy. The computer then creates a visible image on the monitor.

Although the technology is still in its infancy, the bionic counterpart from Hong Kong already has a faster responsiveness than the human eye. The resolution alone is still very coarse – this is not least due to the comparatively thick wires with 0.7 mm. If the researchers from Hong Kong make progress here, their “eye” is likely to be highly sought after in a number of fields of application. In medicine, for example, lenses with zoom function are in demand. But high-performance optical sensors also play an important role in the megatrends Industry 4.0 and autonomous driving.

Sources: Hong Kong UST, tectales.com