Building upon recent work completed in close collaboration with Dr. The latest version of MCAM relies on 54 lenses with higher speed and resolution than the prototype that found Waldo. Whether recording 3D movies of the behavior of dozens of freely swimming zebrafish or the grooming activity of fruit flies at near cellular-level detail across a very wide field of view, the device is opening new possibilities to researchers the world over. In a paper published online March 20 in Nature Photonics, Horstmeyer and his colleagues show off the capabilities of their new high-speed, 3D, gigapixel microscope called a Multi Camera Array Microscope (MCAM). It immediately revealed new behaviors involving pitch and depth that they'd never seen before.' When our colleagues studying zebrafish used it for the first time, they were blown away. 'If you merge multiple viewpoints together (as your two eyes do), you see objects from different angles, which gives you height. 'It's like human vision,' said Roarke Horstmeyer, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University.

Perfecting the process of stitching together dozens of individual cameras with subpixel resolution simultaneously allowed them to see the height of objects too. Six years, several design iterations and one startup company later, the researchers made an unexpected discovery. By combining 24 smartphone cameras into a single platform and stitching their images together, they created a single camera capable of taking gigapixel images over an area about the size of a piece of paper. By the following day, the duo sorted out their software issues and demonstrated a successful proof-of-principle device on the classic children's puzzle book.

Gigapixel software