One of three top spots for the national James Dyson Award goes to an entry by nanotechnology engineering students.
Projects by students from Waterloo Engineering took both runner-up prizes in the Canadian leg of the James Dyson Award competition for student inventors.
SmartPatrol, which uses computer vision to prevent injuries at ski resorts, and Scope, which is developing a better zoom function for smartphone cameras, now move on to the international portion of the 27-country competition.
Scope was created as a Capstone Design project by five nanotechnology engineering students - Alisha Bhanji, Ishan Mishra, Holden Beggs, Fernando Pena Cantu and Zhenle Cao - who graduated earlier this year.
It features lenses made of liquid crystals in a cell, not curved plastic or glass, that can be zoomed by the application of voltages rather than physical movement in compact cameras with limited space.
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