Geometrical optics guide is now SPIE iPhone app

April 26, 2011

Bellingham, WA--The SPIE Field Guide to Geometrical Optics is the first of the SPIE Field Guide series to be converted from print to a mobile iPhone application.

Gail Overton

Bellingham, WA--The SPIE Field Guide to Geometrical Optics is the first of the SPIE Field Guide series to be converted from print to a mobile iPhone application. Like the original print version, the iPhone app covers Gaussian imagery, paraxial optics, first-order optical system design, system examples, illumination, chromatic effects, and an introduction to aberrations. Appendices provide supplemental material on radiometry and photometry, the human eye, and several other topics.

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, publishes the Field Guide series to provide key definitions, equations, illustrations, application examples, design considerations, methods, and tips for use in the lab and in the field in several topics, in accessibly written spiral-bound books. The iPhone application offers full-text search, bookmarking, note taking, hyperlinked terms, history logging, interactive equations, and interactive figures. It is available for download for $6.99 for a limited period. A predecessor "lite" version with more limited functionality is available for free.

Learn more about the app at http://spie.org/x647.xml.

SPIE says early reviews give the new, complete version high ratings, calling it "excellent" and "a great application for anyone in optics." The field guide was authored by SPIE Fellow John Greivenkamp, a professor at the College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona. Content was derived from the treatment of geometrical optics in the college's undergraduate and graduate programs.

SOURCE: SPIE; http://spie.org/x47757.xml

About the Author

Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)

Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.