Shrimp's Eye Looks Toward the Future of DVD Players

The mantis shrimp’s astonishing eyesight involves a remarkably complex system of perceiving and processing color. The reason why, exactly, this small sea critter came to possess such visual acuity remains a bit of a mystery. As is often the case with evolutionary marvels, biologists suspect that the ability arose as part of a mechanism to fine-tune going after a mate or the next meal.

But the full color spectrum capabilities of the mantis shrimp’s eye are also noted for potential application to a household entertainment device possibly coming soon to stores near you. The function of the eye, according to Reuters, could be adapted to a new generation of higher resolution DVD players.

The mantis shrimp’s eye, described as among the most sophisticated in the entire animal kingdom, allows the critter to see a dozen primary colors. Humans, by comparison, see three. The shrimp’s eye cells rotate the plane of polarization as light passes through it. It’s an optical feat not unlike the technologies used in CD and DVD players, but while the latter currently are up to working with a single band of color, the mantis shrimp eye performs the trick across the color spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet.

Having uncovered the mechanism behind the remarkable eye, University of Bristol scientists believe that technological mimicry of the color processing capability can be readily applied to producing a DVD player able to process larger streams of data compared to current models.

Photo courtesy of Jens Petersen, via Wikimedia Commons