A team of researchers from Korea and the US has developed an artificial vision system, which is claimed to offer a full panoramic view both above and under the water — taking its inspiration from the eyes of the fiddler crab.

“Biological visual systems have inspired the development of various artificial visual systems including those based on human eyes (terrestrial environment), insect eyes (terrestrial environment) and fish eyes (aquatic environment),” the team explains of its work. “However, attempts to develop systems for both terrestrial and aquatic environments remain limited, and bioinspired electronic eyes are restricted in their maximum field of view to a hemispherical field of view (around 180°).”

What the team has developed, however, is an artificial vision system offering a panoramic view whether used in air or water — using the compound eyes of the fiddler crab as inspiration for an array of flat microlenses with graded refractive index and a comb-shape flexible silicon photodiode array assembled into a sphere to provide wrap-around imaging.

“If you use a conventional lens with curvature for imaging, its focal point changes when you dip the lens into the water,” co-author Young Min Song explains in an interview with Tech Xplore, which brought the work to our attention. “On the other hand, if you use a lens with a flat surface, you can see a clear image regardless of ambient conditions. The fiddler crab living in the intertidal region has this kind of flat surface of its lens and we just imitated this crab-eye-lens.”

The resulting spherical imaging system is, the team claims, the first to demonstrate the ability to switch between imaging in air and water seamlessly while offering a panoramic view — and could, Song says, lead to 360° omnidirectional cameras for everything from all-weather autonomous vehicles to virtual and augmented reality systems.

The team’s work has been published in the journal Nature Electronics under closed-access terms.