Studying Ray Optics with a Smartphone

Cite as: Phys. Teach. 58, 133 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1119/1.5144800

Published Online: 23 January 2020

Antoine Girot, Nicolas-Alexandre Goy, Alexandre Vilquin, and Ulysse Delabre

Phys. Teach. 58, 133 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1119/1.5144800 58, 133

© 2020 American Association of Physics Teachers.

Studying Ray Optics with a Smartphone
Antoine Girot, Nicolas-Alexandre Goy, Alexandre Vilquin, and Ulysse Delabre, University of Bordeaux, Laboratoire Ondes et Matière d'Aqui-
taine, Bordeaux, France

N
owadays more than two bil-
lion people own smartphones,
without necessarily realizing
they have a mobile physics lab that can
be used to study acoustics,1-3 mechan-
ics,4-7 astronomy,8-10 optics,11-13 fluids
mechanics,14 or even serves as an oscil-
loscope.15 All smartphones have at least
one camera, which is probably the most
well-known and used sensor of this de-
vice. It allows us to take pictures, videos,
to scan QR codes, etc. In this article, we
show how to study simple ray optics with
smartphones and how to determine the
focal length of the smartphone cam-
era, which could be an interesting and
interactive way to introduce ray optics
concepts.

Background
A smartphone camera works with
a converging lens, which forms image Fig. 1. Sketch of the smartphone optics for two cases: (a) the object is situated at infinity
AB of an object AB on a CCD (or and the image appears in the focal plane of the lens (L) on the CMOS sensor (C). (b) For
CMOS) sensor as sketched in Fig. 1. The the closest object (minimal working distance), the image formed appears after the focal
plane. The image is then magnified by a conversion factor to the smartphone screen (S).
framework of ray optics allows us to For the iPhone 4s, f’ = 4.28 mm and dmin = 6.5 cm.
determine the size of this image on the __
sensor. An incident ray from B passing through the center O the focal distance f  from the lens (OA = f ). For the smart-
of the lens is not deviated. This results in image AB  being phone used in this experiment
___ (iPhone 4S), f  is
inverted on the smartphone sensor. Thus all incident rays 4.28 mm, that is to say OA = 4.28 mm [Fig. 1(a)]. If we con-
parallel and close to the optical axis are refracted through the sider now an object located at the closest possible position
lens and exit crossing the axis at focal point F (see Fig. 1). The to
__your smartphone (minimal working___ distance), in our case
distance between the center of the lens O and the focal point OA = –6.5 cm, Eq. (1) gives us OA = 4.58 mm[Fig. 1(b)]. It
F is called focal length f  and it represents the capacity to means that in order to form the image on the camera sensor,
converge light, which is an important feature of the camera. the lens slightly moves along the optical axis. This is basically
In photography, a small focal length leads to a wide field of how the auto-focus mode works on smartphones.
view and small magnification, whereas a larger focal length Another important
___ relation is the magnification , which
leads to a narrower field of view with a higher magnification. ___ the size AB  of the image on the sensor and the size
relates
The focal distance of your smartphone camera is given by the AB of the object:
manufacturer and you can usually find specifications on the
internet. (2)
For thin lenses, the algebraic distance between the lens and
the object OA is related to the distance between the lens and The magnification is greater than 1 if the size of the image
the image and the focal length f  (f  > 0 for positive lens): is larger than the object size, and is negative if the image is
inverted compared to the object, which is the case of smart-
, phones. In this paper, from Eqs. (1) and (2), we will show how
(1)
we can easily determine the focal distance of a smartphone
which is the classic Descartes’ law. This equation gives you the camera. Using Eq. (1) and (2), one easily finds
position of the image if you know the position of the object
and the focal length. For an object at infinity (in practice at a (3)
very large distance compared to the focal length f ), the image
AB  is formed in the image focal plane, so in other words at

DOI: 10.1119/1.5144800 THE PHYSICS TEACHER ◆ Vol. 58, February 2020 133
 of the CMOS sensor and the smartphone screen used
in the experiment (iPhone 4S) are respectively w3 l
= 3.4234.54 mm and W3L = 50375 mm. The con-
version factor is then 1 = L/l = –16.5, so the image
is 16.5 times bigger on the screen than on the camera
sensor ( 1 = W/l = –11.0 , if we look at our screen
across the width of the smartphone). The minus sign
clearly indicates here that the image is inverted to ap-
pear in the right position on your screen.
Fig. 2. Typical images of an object placed on the floor taken with the smart- The method to measure the focal length of our
phone at various distances OA from the smartphone. The vertical measuring smartphone is based on the lens and magnification
tape at lower left allows us to measure the distance between the object and equations [Eqs. (1) and (2)]. The experiment consists
___
the smartphone, whereas a horizontal measuring tape to the right of the in taking pictures of an object of known size AB with
object enables us to measure the size of the object.
our smartphone at various distances OA from the
Table I. Object and image sizes for various distance p = OA. smartphone. Here we approximate the distance between the
Size of the Distance Measured Size of the Magnifica- object and the lens to be almost equal to the distance between
object between size of the object on tion of the the object and the smartphone, which is only valid for an ob-
__
AB (cm) smartphone object on the sensor lens ject that is not too close to the smartphone.
____ We can then easily
___
and
___object the screen A B  (cm) measure the size of the image A1B1 displayed on the smart-
___
OA (cm) A1B1 (cm) phone screen for a few distances OA between the smartphone
____
4 -9 4.5 -0.272 -0.068 and the object (see Fig. 2). Once A1B1 has been measured and
knowing the screen conversion factor ___
____ ___ 1, which is also equal
4 -10 2.5 -0.200 -0.050
to A1B1/ AB , we deduce the real size AB  of the image on the
10 -15 5.1 -0.309 -0.031 CMOS camera sensor. Then we finally determine the magni-
10 -20 3.6 -0.221 -0.022 fication =AB /AB due to the lens for each position OA by
10 -30 2.4 -0.145 -0.0145 using Eq. (2).
10 -50 1.4 -0.085 -0.0085
Results
10 -80 0.9 -0.055 -0.0055
Figure 2 shows typical pictures of the object taken with our
___
0
data smartphone for different positions OA . We measured with
fit a___
simple ruler___the size of the real object. For short distances
OA , we__used AB = ___ 4 cm[see Fig. 2(a)], whereas for long dis-
-50 tances OA, we used AB = 10 cm to ensure a good resolution
(see Table I). For this experiment, we looked at our smart-
phone screen lengthwise so 1 = –16.5. All the experimental
1/γ

-100
-150
-200
-0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0.0
OA (m)
Fig. 3. Inverse of the magnification factor vs. the algebraic dis-
tance OA between the object and the lens. The equation of the fit
is y = 1+ (231.6 m-1)x. The slope is equal to the inverse of the focal
length [see Eq. (3)].
Experiment
As we have seen previously, the lens of a smartphone cam-
era makes an inverted image of a few millimeters on a sensor.
The picture displayed on the smartphone screen is much
larger than the image obtained on the sensor, which means
there is a numerical operation to enlarge it. First of all, we
need to determine the conversion factor 1 existing between
the CMOS sensor and the smartphone screen, which cor-
responds to the ratio between their dimensions (size sensor
and screen size can easily be found on the internet). The size
results are summarized in Table I.
In Fig. 3, we plotted
___the inverse of the magnification 1/
against the position OA according to Eq. (3) and obtained a
line that is in good agreement with the theory.
The fitted line corresponds to the equation of a line with
slope a = 1/f  and intercept 1. By fitting our experimental
curve, we found that the slope equals 231.6 m-1. We finally de-
duced that the focal length of our smartphone is f = 1/a =
4.31 mm. This experimental value is within 10% from the fo-
cal length given by the manufacturer f = 4.28 mm.
Conclusion
We presented here a simple experiment to determine the
focal length of a smartphone camera. This experiment can be
an interesting pedagogical tool to introduce ray optics and
thin lenses to students, by applying its concepts to one of their
everyday life devices.
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