Today on Applied Science I'm going to show you an unusual camera lens that can actually see around

objects

so the camera lens is this huge thing here with the fernell lens in the front and we're going to be looking at these two dominoes
and if we come around the other side this lens is so huge that the way this works is the camera actually goes down inside it like this
and so I'm going to mount the camera here and then we're going to show how to look around that Domino

okay so here we are at the lens at its normal setting and I'm just going to adjust the optics and see what happens absolutely bizarre
the Domino that's in back actually appears larger than the Domino that's in front we just push this back to its normal position and
you can see that it's clearly behind the front Domino

so I'm not moving the lens or anything I'm just adjusting the optics truly a bizarre effect let me show you a different setup in this
setup I have push pins arranged at different distances from the camera lens and the green one is smaller because it's farther away
because that's normal right but this lens does not perceive the world the same way that your eyes or normal camera lenses do and
so now they all appear the same height if we go back the green one is smaller again so basically this lens has the ability to have
different perspectives on the world no perspective on the world or even negative perspective but you'll be surprised at how simple
it is to build one of these so let me show you how it's built

so this whole time that i've been adjusting the cameras perspective all i've been doing is pushing this piece backward and forward
and it slides forward in the tube here it's just some you know particle board with the camera there normal camera lens on the
camera it's a wide-angle and at the end of this tube there's a fernell lens and that's it so basically just moving a camera fore-and-aft
nearer fernell lens gives you this crazy amount of control over perspective let's see why this thing works it doesn't have to be a
fernell lens of course it's just that having a really big diameter is helpful and it's easier to get for now lenses with big diameters so
conceptually let's see how this might work like imagine that you are an insect sitting on the lens here looking this way at the Dom
from this point of view I can actually see the entire back Domino just fine but if you were an insect sitting in the middle of the lens
looking this way you would not be able to see it because the Domino in front blocks it so at least conceptually we can imagine all
the light rays hitting the front of this lens has the ability to construct all kinds of different images we could have a point of view
from all the way over here if we knew how to select the rays of light in there or we could have a point of view from very close to
the center and how do we select how do we make an image out of all these different choices as it turns out it's it's the aperture
that does it so we have this you know infinite number of possible images we could create with a lens and placing an aperture in the
system is actually how we down select all of those you know possibilities into an image and you know as you know from
photography if you have a smaller aperture the image is sharper because you've rejected some of those other possibilities the
fuzziness in Part B comes from the fact that you have all these light rays coming in and if you just mix them all together you get
blurriness but if we down select with a properly sized aperture we get all kinds of control over what the image is going to be and if
you say well you know I could just hold a lens up like this this doesn't have an aperture well in this case the aperture is the lens
itself the hole diameter located at the plane of the lens and as we'll see the location of the aperture relative to this lenses plane
and its focal plane is actually critical to how we get this perspective control so let me draw some ray diagrams so you can see this so
as it turns out your eyeballs and pretty much all normal camera lenses have this routine where the aperture is placed very close to
the lens critically it's within one focal length of the lens so if this is the glass lens here we put the aperture here and it forms this
system known as endo centric optics and so the trick is that this red line is a distant object of the same height as the black line and
the more distant Rays will get focused to a smaller point or to a shorter object on the image plane here so this is very normal right
far away things are smaller it's it's the most obvious thing in the world but there's no physical law that says it has to be that way so
if we change things around a little bit and we put the aperture at the focal point of the lens the system behaves very differently in
this case the aperture is limiting what can get through this whole optical system so even though each one of these objects is still
emitting Ray's in all different directions each one of these is a point emitter the aperture and the focal length of the lens are set up
such that only a select bundle of these Ray's gets through and if you put the aperture right at the focal point of the lens it's very
specific in selecting these rays to only come from parallel rays coming into the lens so if you have two objects that are the same
height the different distances away from the lens they're both spraying light out in all directions our system down selects to the
point where it's only looking at the Rays that are coming in parallel so they actually have the same height on the image plane you
can see another side effect of this is that you can't see sideways out of this the field of view is actually zero degrees because the
lens is only accepting light that's coming in parallel to the optical axis here so interestingly your field of view in this case is only as
big as the lenses that's its maximum which is why the front elements of these telecentric lenses are so huge some of them are
ridiculously large like if you want an image a large object with a telecentric lens it needs to be quite massive indeed which is why
we have this Fornell lens here and then if we take it a step further and we move the aperture behind the focal point of the lens
then the system kind of keeps going and then faraway objects actually go through and have a larger image on the focal plane so in a
way this is a way of seeing around objects because if you follow the red traces it's actually going over the top of this black shorter
object in front so you can image around things and if you had a really huge diameter lens you can see completely around objects so
where's the aperture in my set up we've got the camera in here sliding around like this here's the giant Fornell lens in front where's
the aperture it's actually in the lens here we can reuse it so even though this lens has its own aperture it still functions down select
all the rays that are coming through this giant Fornell lens in front so it still serves the purpose of creating this telecentric or hyper
centric or end of centric system just by positioning where this camera is relative to the front of the lens here so then you may be
wondering why do we even have a lens here at all like why don't we just take the lens off the camera and use it direct well that's
actually how I started this whole experiment and it ran into a lot of problems the issue is that the aperture has to be very very close
to the focal plane so yeah this thing hole gets crammed together and it gets very difficult to build a system that produces good
images but i'll show you what my first attempt was and where I ran into trouble when I started this project I thought I had a really
good source for these this was $5 on ebay and it's a really massive heavy really high-quality lens taken out of a projection TV it has
a couple of fatal flaws though they ended up ruining this thing but even besides the fatal flaws i'll show you how I thought I was
going to do this I 3d printed this converter bracket and even got a aperture out of an old broken lens so I thought I positioned the
aperture right at the focal plane of the lens and I made this so that it would snap together like this it actually goes on there it's just
very tight and then I I laid out a plastic cap that goes on the camera so that when this whole thing is put together it looks kind of
like this pretty cool I thought it looked cool it almost works it's not really that great it's not as good for demonstrating this as the
fernell setup and the reason is that this aperture has to be super close to the film plane that's in there so you can see I even turned
it down because I was really like you know really precisely placing as as close as I could get in there and then I found out that the
images are just not that good when the aperture is so close to the image plane like that you end up with all kinds of problems
because the light rays are shooting really obliquely into the film plane sensor and that causes the problems another big problem is
that this lens was probably made for a red-green-blue projection TV in other words this only had one color shooting through I can
tell because it says x-ray critical part do not operate without this lens in place so it definitely came from a CRT projection television
and those are typically red green blue so this lens is not chromatically corrected so in other words it has a huge chromatic
aberration in the EM it just doesn't look that good even if fernell lens can beat it which is pretty interesting if you want to replicate
it here's the setup that worked for me you want a 200 millimeter Fornell lens if the largest diameter that you can get and there is a
happy medium if you get a fernell lens that's too short a focal length that's a problem because then the aperture has to be very
close and then your camera lens can't really suck in all the light to make an image and if you get it for no lens that's too long a focal
length you'll be way back here and the system will actually have too much magnification so if you put an object here it's just too
zoomed in to make a nice experience it's it's best to have the least amount of magnification so 200 millimeter here and then the
camera lens should be about as wide-angle as possible for these Micro Four Thirds cameras I'm using a 12 millimeter wide angle
lens and this is good because when it's positioned about here at the telecentric point the angle of acceptance into the camera lens
lines up pretty well with the light coming in from the outside so it works out well you may have noticed something else about these
lenses that's weird is it possible to make a telecentric lens that focuses at infinity no no actually it is not possible in fact it gets more
and more difficult to closer you get to infinity which is why all of the examples i've shown you have generally stuff happening pretty
close in front of the lens and if you search around on the web you'll always find telecentric lenses have specific ranges that they
work in so typically less than a meter of working distance for these lenses even the big ones and the reason for that is it just gets
optically more and more difficult to make a telecentric system focus far away it'd be nice if we could do it because then you could
just take this lens and you know aim it at the moon and inspect you know tiny little rocks from here because it's constant
magnification regardless of the distance away it's the same magnification so it would be nice to be able to use that feature but as it
turns out it's just optically not that possible you can't get a free lunch basically some quick construction details on this I used my
favorite shaper to cut these parts out of particle board and the reason I use this is because I wanted this to be relatively thick and
cheap and I didn't really want to cut a 3/8 inch piece of acrylic in my laser cutter so cheap wood is the best way to go here and then
the tube itself is a concrete form so if you go to like your local Home Depot or whatever store they sell these cardboard tubes in
different diameters to pour concrete forms but the funny thing is they only sell three different sizes of - 8 10 and 12 inch at my
store but there's actually close to you know 20 or 30 sizes on the Shelf and it's funny they they actually nest these to ship them
more efficiently so the same 12 inch tube could be you know eleven eleven point five twelve twelve point five and they're all
stuffed together so if you go to the store you can actually find two in which diameter you want if you know what you're looking for
and then the construction is pretty straight forward I just glued all the pieces on sprayed it with black paint screw the lens to the
front and added this little piece of black electrical tape to keep light from leaking into the edge of the lens these four nail lenses are
very sensitive to internal light reflections so just a little black tape to keep those light reflections out another easy way you can
experiment with telecentric lenses is to use macro extension tubes for your camera and so you know the way these work is you put
your lens on there and then connect this to the camera body and normally what this is used for is focusing very close closer than
the lens is normally able to focus but what you can do is put a black piece of material here with an aperture poked in it and then
put it on your camera and make sure that the aperture plane is exactly the Flan's distance behind this lens so now you have an
aperture at the focal plane of the lens now you've got a telecentric lens so if you put this thing on your camera you'll have
telecentric city but the diameter the front diameter of your lens will always be the limiting factor so for this 50 millimeter lens
you're only going to get a field of view that's this big so if we're looking at small objects it works it's just you know that's the
limitation be sure and check out the links in the description if you're interested actually found quite a few good sources on playing
with this and understanding the optics a little better I should also point out that there are uses for these things it's not just a
curiosity if you're doing metrology or production line inspection both telecentric and hyper centric lenses are useful hyper centric
because if you have a conveyor belt going by and you want to inspect all the products on here it's nice to have a lens that can look
around corners right so if you're looking down on it with computer vision and objects are going by you can actually see the sides of
the objects at the same time without moving the lens around that's that's useful and then also if you're doing measurements
having a lens for the has constant magnification is great because you can measure the distance between holes on the top of an
object and the bottom of an object and know that it's exactly the same because optically you're you're not you know making them
small from being far away so anyway I hope you found that interesting and I will see you next time bye