Engineers have built a camera using stretchy electronics that works like a fly's compound eye.

The camera has an array of 180 small lenses stretched across a curved mounting. Nano manufacturing is very difficult and even more so on a curved surface. The scientists took the artificial lenses and embedded them on to flexible rubber sheet tied together with stretchable silicon circuits. The researchers then inflated the rubber sheet like a balloon until it reached the right curve. The thing is about 1 centimeter in diameter and made primarily of a rubber-like material, according to the journal Nature where the work was published.

"We've figured out ways to make cameras that incorporate all of the essential design features of eyes found in the insect world," study co-author John Rogers of the University of Illinois' engineering department told Agence-France Presse.

"The result is a new type of camera that offers exceptionally wide-angle fields of view (nearly 180 degrees) with zero aberrations and uniform illumination intensity."

These tiny, pliable lenses have a very large depth of field meaning they can focus on various object at different distances. They also have very good motion sensitivity similar to an insect's compound eye.

Insect eyes are made up of hundreds or thousands of light-sensing parts called ommatidia. These are bunched together to form the eye but each ommatidium points in a different direction giving bugs a very wide field of vision. The dragonfly is one of several insects that have a very high field of vision because it has about 20,000 ommatidium.

In a typical camera, light enters a flat lens and provides a limited field of view. Even with a fisheye lens, the image is somewhat distorted because of a mismatch between the light entering through a bent lens surface but captured on a flat lens detector within the camera.

Scientists think the camera could be very useful in surveillance equipment, medical endoscopic devices or any place where space is limited.

"Picture the following: a palm-sized micro aerial vehicle uses an artificial faceted eye to navigate autonomously through a collapsed building while other sensors onboard scan the environment for smoke, radioactivity or even people trapped beneath rubble and debris," scientists wrote in the journal.