There’s a thriving cottage industry of smartphone extension accessories,
seeking to harness all that compute power and battery life, and also
often make use of some of the phone’s on-board sensors. Well, here’s another: a neat iPhone extension for macrophotography fans that could also have a variety of medical and/or industrial use-cases.
The Illumoscope — currently seeking $60,000 on Kickstarter to
fund manufacturing costs — is a case for the iPhone 4/4S/5 that has
built in macro photography optics plus a light conditioning system to
allow for optimal illumination of whatever it is you want a closer look
at. The extension means you can use the iPhone’s camera to get a lot
closer to a subject than you would otherwise be able to, to capture very
fine detail. Or go investigating.
Examples of things you might want to peek at in more detail include
jewellery stamps, electronic circuitry, insects and detailed art works,
say its creators. They also envisage various medical scenarios such as
checking out your moles or looking into your inner ears for infection —
rather than having to get someone else to do it for you (the
Illumoscope was actually devised by a audiologist). Yes there are
various macro lens iPhone accessories already
on the market but the Illumoscope goes one better by supporting
multiple use-cases, not merely the taking of pretty close-ups.
It also makes use of the phone’s built in flash to do the lighting up
required to get a clear close-up but moderates the beam to avoid
over-saturation. The basic system consists of an iPhone case (which can
be reversed if you want to switch back to using the phone’s camera sans
macro optics) plus a variety of attachment accessories to support the
various use-cases.
Attachments include a borescope for in-ear or other nook-and-cranny
investigations; an observation chamber where insects can be contained
for closer inspection; and fixed view and measured view scopes for
scanning large areas at high magnification. One posited scenario for the
latter attachments is checking your hotel bed for bed-bugs. The
creators also note the borescope attachments could be used for peeking
into port openings on electronic devices — which could be handy for
makers and tinkerers.
