A revolution in energy-efficient, environmentally-sound, and powerfully-flexible lighting is coming to businesses and homes, according to a paper in latest special energy issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal. The paper envisions the future of lighting—a future with widespread use of light emitting diodes (LEDs), which offer a number of obvious and subtle advantages over […]
New Machine Learning Approach Could Give a Big Boost to the Efficiency of Optical Networks
New work leveraging machine learning could increase the efficiency of optical telecommunications networks. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, fiber optic cables offer the ability to transmit more data over longer distances compared to traditional copper wires. Optical Transport Networks (OTNs) have emerged as a solution for packaging data in fiber optic cables, and improvements […]
Environmentally Stable Laser Emits Exceptionally Pure Light
Researchers have developed a compact laser that emits light with extreme spectral purity that doesn’t change in response to environmental conditions. The new potentially portable laser could benefit a host of scientific applications, improve clocks for global positioning (GPS) systems, advance the detection of gravitational waves in space and be useful for quantum computing. Researchers […]
Multicolor Holography Technology Could Enable Extremely Compact 3-D Displays
Researchers have developed a new approach to multicolor holography that could be used to make 3-D color displays for augmented reality glasses, smartphones or heads-up displays without any bulky optical components. In Optica, The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research, researchers from Duke University, USA describe how they encoded a multicolor image onto a 300-by-300 […]
New Technology Uses Lasers to Transmit Audible Messages to Specific People
Researchers have demonstrated that a laser can transmit an audible message to a person without any type of receiver equipment. The ability to send highly targeted audio signals over the air could be used to communicate across noisy rooms or warn individuals of a dangerous situation such as an active shooter. In The Optical Society […]
New Optical Memory Cell Achieves Record Data-Storage Density
Researchers have demonstrated a new technique that can store more optical data in a smaller space than was previously possible on-chip. This technique improves upon the phase-change optical memory cell, which uses light to write and read data, and could offer a faster, more power-efficient form of memory for computers. In Optica, The Optical Society’s journal […]
New Graphene-Based Sensor Design Could Improve Food Safety
In the U.S., more than 100 food recalls were issued in 2017 because of contamination from harmful bacteria such as Listeria, Salmonella or E. coli. A new sensor design could one day make it easier to detect pathogens in food before products hit the supermarket shelves, thus preventing sometimes-deadly illnesses from contaminated food. In the journal Optical Materials Express, researchers report a […]
Display Design Could Make Lightweight, Compact Smart Glasses a Reality
Researchers have developed a fundamentally new approach to a see-through display for augmented reality, or smart glasses. By projecting images from the glass directly onto the eye, the new design could one day make it possible for a user to see information such as directions or restaurant ratings while wearing a device almost indistinguishable from […]
Holography, Light-Field Technology Combo Could Deliver Practical 3-D Displays
While most interaction with digital content is still constrained to keyboards and 2-D touch panels, augmented and virtually reality (AR/VR) technologies promise ever more freedom from these limitations. AR/VR devices can have their own drawbacks, such as a tendency to induce visual motion sickness or other visual disturbances with prolonged usage due to their stereoscopy […]
Optical Pressure Detector Could Improve Robot Skin, Wearable Devices And Touch Screens
A new type of pressure sensor based on light could allow the creation of sensitive artificial skins to give robots a better sense of touch, wearable blood-pressure monitors for humans and optically transparent touch screens and devices. In the Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letters, researchers report on a sensor that detects pressure by analyzing changes […]