Our Product

Mobile phone companies like Apple sacrifice light collection (number of rays) and optical zoom in favor of small-scale, lightweight, and economical lenses. The main goal of this project was to design and build a device to enhance the image capturing capabilities of traditional iPhone cameras, by adding an augmented lens via clip-on-functionality to the mobile phone. Specifically, our imaging system is optimized for capturing pictures of the moon, as standard iPhone pictures of the moon are overexposed, small, and are in general low fidelity reconstructions. To accomplish this, a lens-mount system was constructed using commercially available items. Optical simulations were used to optimize the system for lunar and long-distance photography and an app was created to give users control of vital iPhone camera settings to optimize imaging parameters for our mounted lens. After the system was constructed, pictures of distant objects were taken by the iPhone both with and without the augmented lens to test image quality. A stress-test was performed with CAD modeling as well as in live trials to test durability and repeated functionality of the hardware as well as to compare this with potential alternatives. Finally, the image data was analyzed and compared to determine how well the augmented lens improved the images.


Testing Results