This new camera technology could change smartphone photography forever.

The camera is very important to our day-to-day life. The famous photographer Chase Jarvis once said “the best camera is the one that’s with you”. So The camera that we always have with us is a smartphone camera. When you want to buy a phone the first thing you look for is how good is the camera.

Smartphone companies always trying to improve the camera quality with a combination of bigger sensor and better software algorithm. But you can only do so much with software algorithm and there is a limit of how big of a sensor you can put in a phone.

With a big sensor, you have to put big lenses and to have big lenses the camera bump has to be bigger. And the situation gets really ugly really quick. For example, the mi 11 ultra, Sharp Aquas r6, Leica Leitz phone 1 with big sensor doesn’t look beautiful. 

To solve this problem ex apple employee Ziv Attar, Tom Bishop co-founded glass. They came up with a revolutionary new way to combine a periscope lens(lens folded horizontally with a 45° mirror ) and anamorphic lens technology to achieve a large sensor without having any camera bump.

If you don’t know how an anamorphic lens works it’s basically a lens that squeezes a wide image and projects on a tall 4:3 sensor. Glasses’ new technology works on the same principles but it’s the opposite. Instead of squeezing a wide view on a 4:3 sensor, it squeezes a 4:3 image on a wide sensor. After taking the photo an AI algorithm seamlessly desqueezes the photo. It can give you an effective APS-C equivalent photo on a smartphone. Because the sensor is is wide and slim it can fit on a smartphone on its side with the help of folding lens/ periscope lens technology.

They also showed some photo samples from their proof of concept prototype and The results are promising. It show’s really high detail, natural color reproduction and natural bokeh without the need of portrait mode. It can massively improve the low light capabilities of the smartphone cameras without night mood.

Glass has raised $2.2 million in funding.

They said that it will take 2-3 years to bring this technology to the market.

Reference: TechCrunch