Metasurfaces are finally starting to hit mass production, enabling cheap but very capable lenses, among other things for our phones and other smart devices.
Summarizing my latest story at Forbes:
Metalenz just unlocked mass-production for ultra-cheap, ultra-secure 3D sensing — bringing FaceID-level biometrics to billions of Android devices. The Boston-based metasurface optics startup has already shipped more than 140 million sensors, but a new manufacturing breakthrough with semiconductor giant UMC now lets the company print up to 10,000 lenses per 12-inch silicon wafer, dramatically lowering cost and boosting scale.
Its flagship tech, Polar ID, uses polarization — the ability to read the structural and material composition of what it sees — to distinguish real human skin from masks or spoof attempts, similar to the high-security depth sensing Apple uses in FaceID. With the new production ramp, this level of security can reach far cheaper phones and IoT devices.
Because polarization reveals chemical and material signatures, the same sensors could power low-cost medical diagnostics, air-quality checks, robotics perception, and advanced industrial sensing — tasks that currently require hardware costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Metalenz faces competition from Trinamix and traditional 3D sensing systems, but the company’s metasurface approach promises the smallest, cheapest, highest-volume path to secure biometrics and next-generation sensing.