Via a Kickstarter pre-sale fundraising effort, DynaOptics (Palo Alto, CA) aims to enter the mobile photography market with what it calls OOWA, a suite of iPhone lens attachments containing freeform lenses of mass-producible plastic. The company says that its freeform designs enable optical zoom that is not too bulky for a phone, and wide-angle lenses with "lower distortion."
The freeform lenses are optimized only across a cellphone's rectangular image field rather than the conventional circular image field, thus becoming somewhat nonrotationally symmetric. The designs enable zero chromatic aberration and zero vignetting, says Li Han Chan, DynaOptics' CEO and cofounder.
DynaOptics says it provides the software tools that help manufacturers make these lenses, rather than making the lenses itself (translation: it is outsourcing the manufacturing). The pre-order encompasses a 110-degree-diagonal wide-angle and a 2.5X zoom telephoto lens, together with a protective phone case that allows for lens attachment, for the iPhone 6 series.
DynaOptics expects the products to ship in November 2016. The product line name is called OOWA, supposedly referring to the oohs and aahs people make when seeing the images produced by the lenses.
Source: DynaOptics at www.dynoptics.com
