I thought it took way too long to get to the point — why would you want to make a touchable lens? How would you use it? What would it even look like in practice?
Background is great but first give me a reason to get excited about the actual device.
"How would you use it?" is the entire video's point.
Now, what would that look like in practice. I think you should first forget about the form factor. I think the use of a smartphone (at this stage) is mostly convenience. The best lens/sensor/cpu/gpu combos are sold in this package.
When the first webcams came out, I think I would have been skeptical if someone told me "this will be a mouse soon". Today, most mice are basically very VERY low resolution webcams with buttons[1]. Maybe a new type of controller, musical instruments, or an entirely new thing will come out of this... Or nothing much, like the two research paper mentionned. In a mouse form factor i think it could be use for some of the functions of a spacemouse[2].
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHBgNGnTiK4 ( I Made my own Space Mouse for Fusion 360 using Magnets (DIY) ). Just check the intro to have an idea on the use of spacemouse.
Id imagine a flexible skin added to the outside of a robot containing lightpipes or fiberoptics coming back to a camera. This lets you detect collision on the outside of a robot at 30-60fps extremely cheaply. Cheap passive collision detection is missing from robotics and this is a step in the right direction. With multimaterial 3d printing you can make a wide variety of different shells for robotics which can automatically detect failures, collisions, damage and stress for the cost of the plastic and a camera sensor.
Solely the cost the materials is about 2 USD when bought in small quantities, but I am using the least expensive clear silicone. Buying the expensive stuff (Smooth-On's Solaris for example) is about 2x-3x the cost but available in much larger quantities.
I look forward to someone cloning this, driving down the cost, and putting it on crowsupply/sparkfun or somewhere. (I mean that as praise, not malice.)
I assume decent results can be achieved with a super-cheap camera module, if the optics are a good match to the silicone part.
I concur, it really is excellent. I wish I knew the total time investment it took to do and document all of this. It must have taken a very long time, not to mention the proofreading!
Most work was done as a part of my day job. It took about half a year. Significant amount of that time is for writing an academic paper. Same content as the blog post, 10x less readers, 10x more time...
