Camera optics have barely changed shape: a stack of spherical lenses in front of a flat sensor. Field of view, depth of field and dynamic range trade against one another, and correcting one usually means adding more glass. Computational imaging recovers some of what the optics give up, but it cannot recover light that never reached the detector.
Animals arrived at different answers. Birds pack photoreceptors into a fovea and see detail only where they are looking. Cats put a reflector behind the retina to reuse light. Cuttlefish use a W-shaped pupil to even out illumination from above. Aquatic animals use a single spherical lens that stays in focus across a wide angle.
We implement these structures as microlens arrays and curved photodiode arrays, and characterise them as complete cameras rather than as isolated optics. Systems we have built include an amphibious camera with a panoramic visual field, an aquatic-vision camera combining a monocentric lens with a silicon nanorod photodiode array, an avian-eye-inspired perovskite system for foveated multispectral imaging, and vari-focal light-field cameras small enough for a phone.