Does your digital camera “bug” you? New ones might, and they are supposed to.

There is news this week that a new type of digital camera was developed that mimics the eyes found in such insects as fire ants and bark beetles.

The camera can view 160-degrees in width – so as CNN reports, “all areas of the photo will be in focus.” The images will be sharper, too.

Domes are covered in 180 tiny micro-lenses, to view a unique angle. This kind of camera features hundreds of lenses, as well.

"We feel that the insect world provides extremely impressive examples of engineering – in the vision, flight, power and sensing systems. I, personally, have been intrigued by the insect eye for as long as I can remember," John Rogers, who teaches at the University of Illinois and who was among the team who developed the camera, told CNN.

Later, when it becomes commercially available, such a camera could be used for surveillance or in medicine where endoscopic cameras now let physicians look in the human body, CNN reported. They could even be found in surveillance drones.

"What we have, in a sense, is many small eyes on one big eye," Northwestern University's Yonggang Huang, who worked on the project, was quoted by eScience News. "Each small eye, composed of a microlens and a microscale photodetector, is a separate imaging system, but when they are all taken together, the camera can take a clear picture, with just one snap, of nearly 180 degrees.”

"Existing camera imaging technology is flat, and we made a system that is curvilinear," Huang added. "Making a stretchable array of photodetectors was easy – that's what we do. The difficult part was making a hemispherical lens. We needed to make sure the lens experienced as little strain as possible when stretched."

On the other hand, Ubergizmo says that traditional cameras use inflexible silicon chips.

Looking ahead, the researchers say that future digital cameras could even mimic the eyes found in shrimp, lobsters, moths and houseflies.

Many other recent scientific advances have looked to nature for innovation. For instance, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have partnered rescue dogs with a snake-like robot. The motion of snakes is mimicked by the robots, TMCnet reported. These could be used in collapsed buildings where rescues need to take place quickly in tight spaces.