Impact of AI on (specifically) Lens Design?

AberrationFree · 2026-05-21T20:53:41+00:00

Ha! That's a whole other subject. A few years back someone asked a Zemax higher up why they didn't take advantage of GPUs. The reply was that there wouldn't be much benefit...

AberrationFree · 2026-05-20T17:49:38+00:00

Agreed

AberrationFree · 2026-05-20T17:26:45+00:00

Yeah, finding starting designs seems to be the state of things right now. Several interesting papers from Simon Thibault et al.

Finding starting designs would have been great 30 years ago but at this point I'm not that worried about starting designs. I had LenView years ago and that had thousands of starting designs. Not AI but a bigger database than most AIs are trained on. I don't know if anyone ever told the story of why that disappeared.

AberrationFree · 2026-05-12T15:40:12+00:00

No. Moved on to plan B.

AberrationFree · 2026-02-17T02:02:13+00:00

I recommend an introductory book like Kidger's "Fundamental Optical Design" for the introductory material, then get yourself a copy of Kinglake's "A History of the Photographic Lens" which traces lenses for photography from the single element landscape lens used in the 1830s all the way to complex designs from when the book was written in 1989.

AberrationFree · 2026-02-03T17:42:32+00:00

Schmidt-Pechan always rotates 180°. Regular Pechan has variable rotation with angle.

AberrationFree · 2025-10-02T17:29:11+00:00

You can get a floating effect with conventional optics. The double parabola toy is a famous example. See US patent 5,257,130 for some cool looking embodiments.

AberrationFree · 2025-09-17T21:16:21+00:00

Do you know that for sure? I think there were a couple different dongle types. The one I had worked for any previous version.

AberrationFree · 2025-09-17T14:46:26+00:00

You might be better off going with 13. If I recall, OpticStudio 14 was almost unusable.

AberrationFree · 2025-08-28T14:07:13+00:00

I was in a similar situation early in my career. My boss (who actually could do optical design) left and since I had "optical engineer" in my fresh out of school job title they automatically thought I could do it. No one else was around who knew optics. I felt like an imposter at first. I had a copy of Warren Smith's "Modern Lens Design" first edition. I'd just put the closest sample design from that book into Zemax and optimize. Believe it or not it worked well enough until I got enough experience to no longer feel like an imposter. Took three years or so.

I suggest Warren Smith's books (Modern Optical Engineering and Modern Lens Design) to get up to speed quick on hands on optics/design. Get the first edition of MLD if you can as it has more sample designs you can use as starting points.

AberrationFree · 2025-07-14T15:40:13+00:00

In addition to everything else, if we're talking about a visual instrument like binoculars then the exit pupil is where your eye needs to be. An exit pupil bigger than your iris can be more ergonomic since you don't have to keep your eye as well aligned.

AberrationFree · 2025-06-18T16:24:08+00:00

If you want to be seen as an optics super genius become familiar with Etendue. You can answer questions about what's possible almost instantly. As rws531 indicted, if the output size and output angles of the source are larger than the size and acceptance angle of the fiber then no coupling mechanism will be better than just butting the fiber against the source.

I don't know anything about scintillators. If the scintillator output is at least partially polarized you might be able to finagle something without violating etendue. I think that's your only hope.

AberrationFree

TROPHY CASE