A Simple Image Archive that's Cheap, Too!
Tim Morken · Microscopy Today · 2002
flllCROSCOPY 101add a second signal processor.Viola!Stereo-vision.With an appropriately chosen objective lenses, positioned correctly, we now have a 10X digital stereo Mousescope™.20Xandsoon are equally doable.Not being satisfied with this, we are currently working on replacing the single objective with a two element design, with a movable second lens in front of the first lens, acting to zoom the magnification.Now we can not only zap the bad guys, but take rapid digital micrographs of reasonable quality of any surface on which we place the mouse.Very useful for following live cells, surface reactions and microcorrosion, on-chip micromachines, and just what those bloody dust mites in our pillows are up to anyway.There is still some fiddling with software, perhaps Photoshop, to integrate the images from the two cameras and processors.These would then be shown on the computer monitor to produce stereo imaging.We admit that this isn't going as well as hoped.Color anaglyph images interfere with the hoped-for color imaging, and polarized images with polarized viewers don't cooperate well with LCD monitors.But as soon as we link this issue to bioterrorism, we'll be abie to get a multi-million dollar DARPA grant, hire a battery of programmers and monitor engineers, and solve the problem in no time.What's a few miliion dollars for software and monitor design, when with a few simple modifications of the ubiquitous computer mouse we have invented a cordless, go-anywhere S30 digital stereomicroscope?®