To mimic the fly eye, the researchers took a stretchy layer embedded with 180 lenses, placed it over another layer filled with photodetectors, and essentially blew it up like a balloon. Rigid connections kept the individual lenses firmly attached to their photodetectors while the stretchy material around them allowed the fake eyeball to take the desired shape, giving it about a 160-degree view. The researchers' mechanical bug eye isn’t yet a top-of-the-line model: It contains 180 lenses, about the same number in the eyes in fire ants and bark beetles, which don’t have great vision. The dragonfly eye, by contrast, contains about 28,000. But with a few more improvements and a lot more lenses, this fly-eye camera could one day be put to the test in medical devices that need to see inside the body and even tiny flying rescue robots to navigate perilous environments, such as a collapsed, smoking building after an earthquake.
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-75745837/