This phone camera breakthrough could see the end of ugly rear bumps

Apple and Samsung could soon be showing off the latest iPhone and Galaxy handsets with truly flat backs, thanks to a new camera breakthrough.

Until recently, the use of wide-angle cameras in smartphones has meant the need to stack up lenses which leads to greater thickness and, ultimately, unsightly camera bulge.

A breakthrough at KAIST, a combination of Korean research teams, led to the potential for a bump-free camera future.

This could appear in your phone in the future but right now it's still early days. The research created an ultra-wide 140-degree angle field of view camera without lens protrusion.

This is expected to roll out, not only in smartphones and tablets, but also medical endoscopes, wearables, micro-robots and more.

The camera lens is able to offer the wide field of view while keeping down to a super minimal 1mm – roughly the thickness of a coin.

This was achieved by copying nature, specifically the parasitic insect Xenos peckii. This uses multiple eyes to capture partial segments of a scene, integrated into a high resolution image by the brain.

Applying this to the camera allowed the team to achieve high resolution and wide angles while keeping the lens depth to a minimum.

All that and this could appear soon as the research team has completed a technology transfer to MicroPix – a specialist in optical imaging, with the goal of full-scale commercialization by next year.