This New Pixel Could Turn Screens Into Cameras
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Facebook X LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Flipboard Bluesky Email Copy Link Home → Research → Technology ETH Zurich researchers built a pixel that can both display and analyze light.
Pixels are single-function. The pixels in your camera capture light, while the ones on your screen emit it. But what if a pixel could do both so you could record with your screen?
Now, researchers at ETH Zurich say they have built a new kind of pixel that does just that. The device, called a Fourier pixel, can emit light and read incoming light, including details ordinary pixels miss: brightness, phase, and polarization. That could one day lead to camera-displays, holographic screens, and optical devices that adjust themselves as they sense the world.
The word “pixel” comes from “picture element,” a term that appeared nearly a century ago in the magazine Wireless World. Since then, pixels have defined modern life. On a phone or television, they create images.
In a camera, they capture them. But they have remained specialists. The ETH Zurich team, led by David Norris of the Optical Materials Engineering Laboratory, set out to break that split.
The new work builds on an earlier ETH Zurich study in which Norris’s group built “Fourier surfaces”—precisely shaped, wave-like surfaces designed with Fourier mathematics, a branch of mathematics that breaks complex patterns into waves. That earlier method gave the researchers a way to sculpt optical surfaces with nanometer-level accuracy. In the new study, they used that fabrication approach to make a far more ambitious device: a pixel that can both generate and read complex light fields.
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