Angular distribution of light emission from compound-eye cornea with conformal fluorescent coating

The complex morphology of the apposition compound eyes of insects of many species provides them a wide angular field of view. This characteristic makes these eyes attractive for bioreplication as artificial sources of light. The cornea of a blowfly eye was conformally coated with a fluorescent thin film with the aim of achieving wide field-of-view emission. On illumination by shortwave-ultraviolet light, the conformally coated eye emitted visible light whose intensity showed a weaker angular dependence than a fluorescent thin film deposited on a flat surface.