Two big trends these days are the inclusion of “no moving parts” and megapixel cameras built into cell phones. Varioptic, basing their work on that of a couple of French universities in Lyon and Grenoble, are working on a liquid lens for some awesome auto-focus goodness. The lens is composed of a bead of oil suspended in a water solution. When voltage is applied to the edges of this “lens”, the bead of oil changes shape, and in effect, brings the picture into focus.

In this way, this system has absolutely no moving parts. Amazing! It will only take up 5-15% of the power traditionally needed for an equivalent device, and what’s more, it does it at one-third the cost. The developers are saying that the Varioptic liquid lens can focus on objects as close as 5 centimeters. Demonstrations of the solution have shown that this system is capable of taking excellent resolution pics of business cards.

Samsung has expressed some serious interest in this technology, and they “might issue” a commercially available camera phone equipped with the Varioptic liquid lens as early as Q3 of this year.