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Comment by peterbmarks | Hacker News Reader

But how is the curve of the lens controlled? Is it some sort of surface tension guided by the edge height of the enclosing ring?

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It’s a combination of surface tension and buoyancy; the resulting minimum energy surface can be designed to whatever freeform shape you want by controlling the liquid density and the geometry of the frame.

thickness of the membrane, but this will cause fresnel lenses if annular, and complexity if a continuous curve, and also introduce (spherical?) aberration of its own due to non-linear effects on light through a varying sized medium before hitting the "lens" part inside the membrane

this is me thinking in terms of "what things about an inflatable structure change how spherical it becomes, when inflated" and adding in "what does it do to optics"

not an optician, a physicist or an inflatable toy clown.

I'm fairly sure that the medium within the ring-shaped mold is homogenous once cured--I don't think it's a cured surface membrane with a liquid interior?

Presumably that's the purpose of the heat-curing process described in their paper, as UV won't be able to penetrate arbitrarily deep into the polymer.

Its injectable. What are they injecting?

They inject a liquid polymer solution into the water+glycerol solution, in the area they want it to be. 'Immiscible' means they won't mix, it'll just form a homogenous bubble/blob in the water. And they carefully adjust the density of the water+glycerol ahead of time to match the density of the polymer, so the blob of polymer neither floats nor sinks. Surface tension affects the shape of the blob caught in the ring mold, which is created ahead of time to produce the shape they want. Then they cure it, 'freezing' the liquid polymer as it solidifies. There's no liquid inside when it's done.

Wow I'd completely misunderstood what was being initially UV cured, I thought it was a "skin" of material to form the shape much as a balloons final shape is influenced by the thickness of the rubber and was inflated. Talk about the bad effects of skim reading!

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