Researchers develop tiny camera the size of a grain of salt - and it could turn your phone into one big camera

Researchers have created an ultracompact camera the size of a grain of salt capable of producing pictures on par with lenses hundreds of thousands of times larger than it. Engineers from Princeton University and the University of Washington say that the camera can produce full-colour images that could be used in collaboration with medical robots to diagnose and treat diseases. Traditional cameras use curved glass or plastic to bend light rays, this new camera uses'metasurface' technology which is produced like a computer chip. The metasurface of this particular camera has 1.6 million cylindrical posts – each approximately the size of a virus – to make up a system just half a millimetre wide. Each of those posts has its own unique geometry, working like an optical antenna, and machine-learning algorithms can use the posts' combined interactions with light to create high-quality images.