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Quote:

“In talking with the press, Joanna Aizenberg, a Bell Labs scientist and the lead author of the study, likens the brittlestar to a digital camera that builds up a picture pixel by pixel. In this exchange, one quickly loses track of whether the digital camera is a metaphor for brittlestar vision or the reverse, especially as the metaphor begins to take on a strikingly material form:

'Instead of trying to come up with new ideas and technology, we can learn from this marine creature .... The [calcitic] lenses surround the whole body, looking in all different directions and providing peripheral vision to the organism .... This is the quality we all want to incorporate in optical devices, in cameras in particular. Instead of having one lens pointing in one direction, you could have thousands of lenses pointing in different directions. This will give you perhaps a 360-degree view of the whole space.'