Two Princeton grad students have developed a new camera lens that uses a hologram to add light phase information to the color and luminance information already stored by cameras.  When encoded through a nonlinear wave mixer -- a rectangular pill-sized crystal of a material called strontium barium niobate -- then decoded via software, the scene can be displayed at high resolution from the extremes of the lens' field of view to any point in between. "It allows you to take a closer look at an object without narrowing your field of view," said Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton who led the research. The study, co-written with graduate students Christopher Barsi and Wenjie Wan, is reported as the cover story in the April edition of Nature Photonics.

By capturing information that would normally be lost, the new method could greatly enhance the resolution using normal light -- allowing scientists to build microscopes and other devices capable of so-called super-resolution.  Scientists see potential uses in lithography, tomography, data encryption and in characterizing the optical properties of new nonlinear materials.  You can read more on this subject here.

If they can get the computing power needed for the software down to a reasonable level, it might even be possible to put this lens in a camcorder.  Imagine being able to zoom in 10x while retaining the full field of view in sharp focus.  We could get some impressive panoramic scenes out of this.