Cheap sensors that help cars avoid collisions could emerge from research into a lens-less imaging system.

BBC: Lens-less camera emerges from metamaterials work

CDM's imaging system, it passes first through conventional optical elements, and then through a lens moulded into a shape of a cubic-like function (ie, with a surface which, instead of being spherical, is relatively flat in the centre but has scalloped edges).

ECONOMIST: MONITOR

The imaging system developed by graduate student John Hunt and colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina has no lens and instead combines a metamaterial mask or aperture and complicated mathematics to generate an image of a scene.

BBC: Lens-less camera emerges from metamaterials work