Optics: Bioinspired Tunable Lens with Muscle‐Like Electroactive Elastomers (Adv. Funct. Mater. 21/2011)

A bioinspired electrically tunable lens made of dielectric elastomer “artificial muscles” is presented by Carpi and coworkers on page 4152 . The cover image shows a schematic sectional view of the all‐polymer device, which is inspired by the architecture of the crystalline lens and ciliary muscle of the human eye. The background image is a detail of a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (“A study of the proportions of the eye and eyelid” ‐ Royal Library of Turin, # 15574). In the paper, the authors show that upon electrical activation, the elastomeric artificial muscle is able to deform the fluidfilled elastomeric lens, producing a relative variation of focal length comparable to that of the human lens.