You likely don’t notice high-precision optics in your everyday life. Despite that, high-precision optics have been a major part of our lives for over a generation and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
Not sure how high-precision optics affect your life? From the internet to gravity waves, we’re going to try to cover it all. Keep reading to find out how high-precision optics change your life every day!
1. What Are High-Precision Optics?
High-precision optics include a variety of different optical instruments such as:
- Lenses
- Optical flats
- Beamsplitters
- Prisms
These instruments often have different coatings to suit different purposes. Some coatings will reflect only certain wavelengths, or allow only a certain orientation of photons through at a time. If you have ever used a pair of polarized sunglasses or watched a 3D movie, you’ve used a tool with such coatings.
If you want to know more about such instrumentation, don’t worry, there are plenty of extra resources to geek out on.
But what can these instruments do in products? One thing they can do is measure the distance precisely. We aren’t talking about those high-power binoculars gathering dust in your drawer, either.
2. Going the Distance With High-Precision Optics
When covering large distances in a short time, nothing beats the speed of light. But what about measuring distances to things? How do high-precision optical instruments help us in our daily life by making measurements?
Aside from the surveyor’s laser levels to measure job sites and geological areas, there are dozens of applications for navigation and measurement.
From missiles to robots, laser guidance and detection systems help a variety of products to guide and align themselves.
Laser-guided vehicles (LGV) like automated forklifts use laser measuring to avoid objects and boost warehousing efficiency. Just ask Amazon and post offices around the world how they’re able to sort and pick so rapidly.
One such system, called LiDAR, is even going to help your car become a self-driving vehicle.
3. High-Precision Optics in Computing
We’ve already mentioned how optics in the form of fiber optics has changed communication. But you may want to store information for a long time or make a copy of some sort of data for a friend.
DVDs, CDs, and Blue-ray discs are excellent examples of what consumer-level precision optics are capable of. Recently, though, high-precision optics is bringing data storage to new heights.
Imagine a time not long from now when you’ll be able to store over 500 terabytes of information cheaply, and know it will last forever. Researchers have been able to do just that in Project Silica. The technology will likely first show up as an archiving solution, but later will likely find a home in datacenters.
Another technology that will probably emerge in data centers and research centers is optical computing. Quantum computing gets plenty of attention because of its exotic nature, but optical-electric hybrid computing is gaining a lot of traction after decades of research.
You won’t see an optical-electrical laptop any time soon, but the technology holds so much potential it could easily change the way we use and think about personal technology, including your smartphone.
Imagine a future where you offload the computational power of your phone to a supercomputer in a data center. The results are then transmitted by 5G or other high-speed data connection to your device. This essentially turns your phone into a full-power computer.
Cloud computing using these technologies has the potential to change economies, and our future.
Seeing the Light
With high-precision optics, the sky’s the limit with possibilities. At The Suntrics, we’re happy to bring you the latest in tech, business, and lifestyle.
There’s more than just high-precision optics to tell you. Browse our articles to find out more life-changing news!
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