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At breakneck speed and illusion, the smartphone industry continues to evolve while trying to deal with the physical limitations of the hardware. Chief among those constraints is the camera system. If you look at the back of your device, you’ll probably find a bump - and there’s a good reason for that.
Metalenz believes it has the solution, a flat one at that.
The contemporary stack
The camera system on your device is the sum of several pieces. Just the lens usually has a stack of components, but you also have the image sensor. And let’s not forget that these days smartphones usually don’t have a single lens. If the lenses are made smaller, the clarity of the image will start to be affected.
To give you a more concise idea, talking with
Wired, Oliver Schindelbeck, responsible for innovation at Zeiss, said that “the optics usually in smartphones nowadays consists of between four and seven lens elements”. It’s not possible to stack more components vertically without consequently increasing the camera bump - for example, the “periscope cameras” are placed sideways.
Talk metasurfaces to me
That complex, rich in components 3D approach is not the path forward, according to Metalenz. They developed a solution that operates in a plane surface: optical metasurface. Its nanostructures are incredibly small (one-thousandth the width of a human hair), which allows the company to save space inside the phone and battery life.
Metalenz is working with a single lens built on a “glass wafer” that measures between 1x1 and 3x3 millimeters. Traditional lenses bend and direct light, but since the nanostructures have different patterns, they are able to correct that absence.
It’s not something the company started to develop now. The core tech of what you are reading now is the result of a decade-long research - while Robert Devlin, CEO, and co-founder of the company, was working on his Ph.D. at Harvard. The physicist Federico Capasso is another co-founder. And the company has existed outside the academic incubator since 2017.
More than a lab-fantasy
As you can probably guess, it was not always smooth sailing. “Early demos were extremely inefficient. You had light scattering all over the place, the materials and processes were non-standard, the designs weren’t able to handle the demands that a real world throws at you,” said Devlin, quoted by
Techcrunch.
Even now, when the company is ready to go into mass production later this year, Devlin recognizes that “making one that works and publishing a paper on it is one thing, making 10 million and making sure they all do the same thing is another”. But Metalenz is ready, so much so, they claim that right now they are capable of producing one million lenses in a single day.
Smartphones and beyond
You are probably imagining this tech being applied to the main camera system of your device, but the company says it has a lot of uses. Outside the smartphone-realm, it can be incorporated in health care tools and virtual and augmented reality cameras. Lab equipment, for example, can also benefit from it. Even cars, according to Devlin.
And remember the recent patent OnePlus obtained? Yes,
the one that allows for the selfie camera to be hidden on the bezel? Well, Metalenz promises their system can also be incorporated in the selfie shooter, reducing significantly the notch or even being used underneath the display.
OK, now what?
The company raised $10 million in Series A investment (
VentureBeat) and they have plans for “tens of millions” of shipments. “Because we’re using traditional fabrication techniques, it allows us to scale really quickly. We’re not building factories or foundries,” commented Devlin. “We can use what’s already there,” he added.
The first consumer device won’t be a smartphone and, it is said, will arrive in early 2022. Later that year, we’ll see the first solution implemented on a consumer-ready phone. For now, we don’t know the company that will use Metalenz technology next year, but it is a company “active in 3D sensing”.
But tell me, dear reader,
are you curious about this new camera tech, and do you see it as a viable path to revolutionize commercial electronics? Click to expand...
