Just because we can mimic the look of a fly’s eye does not mean we know how the information is processed.
Housefly a model for new wide-angle lens
Bioengineers at the University of California at Berkeley have created artificial compound eyes, modeled after those of insects, that could one day be used to broaden the field of vision for cameras and sensors, even beyond fish-eye lenses, according to the researchers.
The research could lead to wide-area cameras for ultrathin cell phones in the next few years, according to Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley.
Mimicing the structure of a fly’s eye does not mean we actually know how the fly processes that information. For example, I think that the following could be more representative of the processing going on inside the fly’s head:
By inserting a microlens array between the main lens and the photosensor, their “light field camera” takes one shot, but also captures information about light conditions. And you can later compute “photographs in which subjects at every depth appear in finely tuned focus.”
Resembling the multi-faceted compound eye of an insect, the microlens array is a square panel composed of nearly 90,000 miniature lenses. Each lenslet separates back out the converged light rays received from the main lens before they hit the photosensor and changes the way the light information is digitally recorded.
Just because something has a compound lens does not make it a copy of a fly’s eye, especially considering that half of a fly’s brain is dedicated to sight.
What do you think? Is a microlens array all it takes to emulate fly vision?
I’m not so curious about how a fly sees (except I hope it’s the rolled up newspaper I’m swinging at it), but this technology could be the prototype of that cool camera thing Harrison Ford used in Bladerunner. Zowie!
I think this goes deeper than breaking down the mechanical aspects of how a fly’s eyes work. If we really want to “know how a fly sees”, we have to ask questions about fly consciousness. What the visual experience of being a fly is like. There’s currently no way to do that unless we transform our own brains into a fly brain…and even then, we could probably never fully capture the experience of being a fly. Most of vision is in the brain, not in the eye, and fully understanding a fly brain with a human brain is difficult if not impossible. It’s hard enough to know what it’s like to be another person, let alone a fly.
Soon, perhaps, they’ll scotch tape one of the little devils to the inside of an fMRI scanner, show him some objects (fly swatter? lady flies?), and see how the little brain works. 🙂
Certainly any statement about how flies see is mostly speculation right now, although an optical engineer can comment on potential benefits from a multi-lensed configuration vs. a single lens with more confidence.
GROSS!!
Its interesting that the flys brain is dedicated mostly to vision and not other sences. And ditto neuro said it the best part they didn’t even see the fly swater coming!
The neuron wiring of the visual part flies brain was studied and is quite well known: for example we know that they see much more images per second than we do: that is not really estonashing since that animal have to fly around quickly without crashing (which is not easy).
This simple neural network was also “reformed” in robots (only by wiring connection) with different visual inputs, mimicking the rapidity of vision and its specific attention to moving objects…
Interested? read:
A look into the cockpit of the fly: visual orientation, algorithms, and identified neurons. Egelhaaf M, Borst A.
In the journal of neuroscience 1993 Nov;13(11):4563-74.