Bionics and Biomimetic Optics – What applied optics can learn from nature

Science and engineering have reached a new quality in the way we do research and technology development. There is a new paradigm: what we learn from nature. Optical bionics and biomimetic optics are rather young disciplines compared to bionics in material science and tooling engineering. Sustainability and modern technological system require sophisticated and optimized solutions. This optimization principle has become obvious for a variety of visual tasks. For each environmental condition the most appropriate visual system is not only taking pure optical aspects into account but instead also implies tunable and motion functionalities: tunable lenses in vertebrate eyes and spectrally broadband visual systems in the complex compound eyes of some crustaceans. Another example are antireflection motheye structures for elastopolymer lens applications, which are based on the manufacturing by a selforganized process known as block copolymer micelle nanolithography. So the challenge of bringing nature’s solutions into modern systems does not only lie in the copying of its functionality but also in exploitation of sustainable technological processes that are found in such biological systems.