Stretchcam: zooming using thin, elastic optics

Stretchcam is a thin camera with a lens capable of zooming with small actuations. In our design, an elastic lens array is placed on top of a sparse, rigid array of pixels. This lens array is then stretched using a small mechanical motion in order to change the field of view of the system. We present in this paper the characterization of such a system and simulations which demonstrate the capabilities of stretchcam. We follow this with the presentation of images captured from a prototype device of the proposed design. Our prototype system is able to achieve 1.5 times zoom when the scene is only 300 mm away with only a 3% change of the lens array’s original length. References and links 1. S. K. Nayar, D. C. Sims, and M. Fridberg, “Towards self-powered cameras,” in “2015 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP),” (2015), pp. 1–10. 2. K. Z. Ahmed, M. F. Amir, J. H. Ko, and S. 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