3D came to microscopes

The trendy 3D image format has found a new and quite useful application. A team of Ohio State University scientists led by Associate Professor (on the Associate Professor website) Allen Yi (Allen Yi) created an optical lens that alone is capable of forming a three-dimensional image of microscopic objects. The main advantage of the invention is not its novelty, since 3D technology has been used in biology for about 10 years, but the possibility of significantly reducing the cost of 3D microscopes. In existing devices, several lenses or cameras on micromotors move around the object under study, which form the image. The new lens is the first of its kind single fixed lens that creates microscopic 3D images. The engineers successfully tested their lens by capturing an image of the tip of a ballpoint pen, whose diameter does not exceed 1 mm, and a drilling head with a diameter of 0.2 mm.

Annotation to this work can be read here .