Designed primarily as a scientific tool to investigate how insects see, navigate and learn, the 'eye' is a perspex globe with the ability to look in all directions as once, just like insects. With its unobstructed all-round view, the artificial eye also has potential uses for guiding robot vehicles and aircraft, providing low-cost panoramic security surveillance and novel lighting systems, its developers say.
It was designed by a team of international scientists from The Vision Centre, in Australia, as a tool to emulate as closely as possible what insects see as they zip around the landscape, as part of a larger project to understand how they navigate, find food, escape predators and especially, how insects like bees find their way home.
“Panoramic vision means you have far more information with which to monitor and control your own movement in the world. Insects, in some ways, do this better than we do because they can see all round them at once,” explains Dr Jochen Zeil of The Vision Centre and the Australian National University.
The lightweight device is a beautifully machined perspex globe with an embedded silvered cone, which allows a 360° all-round view, uninterrupted by the brackets used to support mirrors in similar devices. It sits on a standard video camera.
Most panoramic devices also have a blind spot where the scene is occluded by the mirror but the team solved this by inserting a tiny wide-angle lens at the apex of the mirror, giving a 260° vertical field of view.
The Vision Centre insect imager is due to be put through its paces shortly, mounted on a radio-controlled helicopter — a pure research application which also hints at possible future uses in helping robot aircraft to navigate in three dimensions with the use of sight.