Metalenz’s Polar ID face-scanning technology works even when the camera is hidden under the display.
We're all too familiar with the notch—the unsightly cut-in that graced many smartphones for years, like the iPhone X or the LG G7.
The notch has largely been replaced on today’s smartphones by floating punch-hole cameras that take up less space and look a little more futuristic, though notches are still prevalent on some laptops, like Apple’s MacBooks.
On the iPhone, Apple calls its floating pill-shaped camera system the Dynamic Island, which debuted on the iPhone 14. The iPhone still has the largest camera cutout today, due to its Face ID biometric authentication system. (Barring Google Pixel phones, the vast majority of Android phones don't offer a secure face authentication equivalent, so they don't need a bulky camera cutout.) This island could get much smaller, however, thanks to new under-display camera technology announced at Display Week 2026 from Metalenz, a optics startup from Boston.
A Primer on Metasurfaces
Metalenz’s optical metasurfaces technology is a flat-lens system that uses a fraction of the space of traditional multi-lens elements in most smartphones. You can read more about it in our original coverage of the company here, but in short, instead of refracting light through multiple plastic or glass lens elements—which improves image clarity, corrects aberrations, and brings more light to the camera sensor—metasurfaces use a single lens with nanostructures to bend light rays toward the sensors.
Metalenz says more than 300 million of its metasurfaces are already used in consumer devices today, replacing bulky traditional optics in time-of-flight sensors that capture depth information and assist with a camera's autofocus.
The company also pioneered a method to use these metasurfaces to capture polarization data. When light hits an object with specific material properties, it creates a unique polarization signature. Light reflecting off black ice has a different polarization signature from light reflecting off the road. Using machine learning algorithms, this enables a system that can quickly identify black ice on the road and alert the driver.
That's why the company developed Polar ID, a facial authentication platform to rival Apple's Face ID. With polarization data, its sensors can distinguish a real face from someone wearing an eerily accurate 3D mask of the same person, because the polarization information from light bouncing off a human's skin is unique compared to light bouncing off the silicone of the mask. Yes, it's even more secure than Google's face unlock system on Pixels, which can be spoofed with a high-quality 3D mask.
Metalenz announced a partnership with Qualcomm in late 2023 to scale it up, and now this Polar ID face-recognition system is finally ready for mass production. It will be deployed on consumer devices—laptops and smartphones—in 2027. Its rollout could mean that Android finally gets a Face ID equivalent, with components that use less space than Apple's TrueDepth camera system, and unlike Google's face unlock, it isn’t affected by bright light or dim environments.
“We've now proven with multiple third parties that have done testing that we meet the highest security standards they have in terms of performance, in terms of keeping out masks and any mask of any quality,” Rob Devlin, CEO of Metalenz, tells WIRED.
But the next step? Making those components disappear from view.
The Under-Display Camera
At Display Week, a display technology convention in Los Angeles, Metalenz showed off how its Polar ID system could work underneath an OLED display. You'll still have a selfie camera visible on the screen for, you know, selfies. But the Polar ID system would sit next to it under the display, where it’s effectively invisible.
This isn't the first time we've seen under-display cameras—Samsung famously employed one on several iterations of its Galaxy Z Fold folding smartphone—but image quality greatly suffers when the camera is stuffed under the display. This is likely why Samsung switched to a traditional punch-hole camera on its latest Z Fold7.
That isn't much of a problem with a sensor designed to capture polarization data. Devlin says the signal does get slightly distorted by hiding under the display, and you lose some intensity, but the polarization information largely remains unchanged. You can see in the example image above—the top three images are what the traditional Polar ID sensor sees, and the set below is what it sees when Polar ID is underneath an OLED display.
The display needs a thinned-out section to house the Polar ID sensor, meaning this system requires tight integration with the display manufacturer. But adding that thinner region should not affect panel quality. (Devlin says the company is in early conversations with a few of the bigger smartphone manufacturers but didn’t divulge details.) “You can't really even tell that there is a thinned-out region,” Devlin says about the display.
Over a video call, I watched a demo of Devlin testing Polar ID under OLED, and the system had no trouble authenticating his face or discerning when he was wearing a 3D mask.
“Folks have decided to differentiate along a continuous display versus Apple’s interrupted display,” Devlin says. “So I think this is also something that can really offer face unlock in a truly seamless manner—seamless in the sense that you don't even feel like you're securely unlocking your phone when you are.”
You can imagine that this under-display camera could prove useful not just in phones but in laptops that want to eliminate the notch for a continuous display. While Polar ID will arrive on devices in 2027, Devlin says the under-display version is likely an extra year out and should land in the market in 2028.
Smartphone companies have long been infatuated with an uninterrupted screen experience while minimizing the black bars around the panel, with some, like Samsung, exploring under-display cameras and others even trying pop-up cameras that mechanically rise up out of the phone's frame. It is likely why Android phone makers haven't fully adopted a Face ID-like biometric authentication system: The hardware was too bulky and expensive to justify interrupting a beautiful, edge-to-edge display. Polar ID’s solution might finally give them the security they need without the “island” they've been trying to avoid.
The optics in your smartphone have been pretty much the same for more than a decade. That’s about to change.
The camera on the first iPhone way back in 2007 was a mere 2 megapixels. And it only had a rear camera; there wasn't even a front-facing selfie shooter. Today, you'll find multiple cameras on the front and back of phones—some of them with sensors as large as 108 megapixels, like the biggest camera on Samsung's Galaxy S21 Ultra.
But while the sensor size and megapixel counts of smartphone cameras have increased considerably in the past decade—not to mention improvements in computational photography software—the lenses that help capture photos remain fundamentally unchanged.
A new company called Metalenz, which emerges from stealth mode today, is looking to disrupt smartphone cameras with a single, flat lens system that utilizes a technology called optical metasurfaces. A camera built around this new lens tech can produce an image of the same if not better quality as traditional lenses, collect more light for brighter photos, and can even enable new forms of sensing in phones, all while taking up less space.
A Flat Lens
How does it work? Well, first it's important to understand how phone camera lenses work today. The imaging system on the back of your smartphone may have multiple cameras—the latest iPhone 12 Pro has three cameras on the back—but each camera has multiple lenses or lens elements stacked on top of each other. The main camera sensor on the aforementioned iPhone 12 Pro utilizes seven lens elements. A many-lens design like the iPhone's is superior to a single-lens setup; as light passes through each successive lens, the image gains sharpness and clarity.
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“The optics usually in smartphones nowadays consists of between four and seven lens elements,” says Oliver Schindelbeck, innovation manager at the optics manufacturer Zeiss, which is known for its high-quality lenses. “If you have a single lens element, just by physics you will have aberrations like distortion or dispersion in the image.”
More lenses allow manufacturers to compensate for irregularities like chromatic aberration (when colors appear on the fringes of an image) and lens distortion (when straight lines appear curved in a photo). However, stacking multiple lens elements on top of each other requires more vertical space inside the camera module. It's one of many reasons why the camera “bump” on smartphones has grown larger and larger over the years.
“The more lens elements you want to pack in a camera, the more space it needs," Schindelbeck says. Other reasons for the size of the bump include larger image sensors and more cameras with zoom lenses, which need extra room.
Phone makers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and while some, like Samsung, are now folding optics to create “periscope” lenses for greater zoom capabilities, companies have generally stuck with the tried-and-true stacked lens element system.
“The optics became more sophisticated, you added more lens elements, you created strong aspheric elements to achieve the necessary reduction in space, but there was no revolution in the past 10 years in this field,” Schindelbeck says.
This is where Metalenz comes in. Instead of using plastic and glass lens elements stacked over an image sensor, Metalenz's design uses a single lens built on a glass wafer that is between 1x1 to 3x3 millimeter in size. Look very closely under a microscope and you'll see nanostructures measuring one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Those nanostructures bend light rays in a way that corrects for many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems.
The core technology was formed through a decade of research when cofounder and CEO Robert Devlin was working on his PhD at Harvard University with acclaimed physicist and Metalenz cofounder Federico Capasso. The company was spun out of the research group in 2017.
Light passes through these patterned nanostructures, which look like millions of circles with differing diameters at the microscopic level. “Much in the way that a curved lens speeds up and slows down light to bend it, each one of these allows us to do the same thing, so we can bend and shape light just by changing the diameters of these circles,” Devlin says.
The resulting image quality is just as sharp as what you'd get from a multilens system, and the nanostructures do the job of reducing or eliminating many of the image-degrading aberrations common to traditional cameras. And the design doesn't just conserve space. Devlin says a Metalenz camera can deliver more light back to the image sensor, allowing for brighter and sharper images than what you'd get with traditional lens elements.
Another benefit? The company has formed partnerships with two semiconductor leaders (that can currently produce a million Metalenz "chips" a day), meaning the optics are made in the same foundries that manufacture consumer and industrial devices—an important step in simplifying the supply chain.
New Forms of Sensing
Metalenz will go into mass production toward the end of the year. Its first application will be to serve as the lens system of a 3D sensor in a smartphone. (The company did not give the name of the phone maker.)
Devlin says current 3D sensors, like Apple's TrueDepth camera for Face ID, actively illuminate a scene with lasers to scan faces, but this can be a drain on a phone's battery life. Since Metalenz can bring in more light to the image sensor, he claims it can help conserve power.
Other good news? If it's a 3D sensor on the front of a phone for face authentication, Devlin says the Metalenz system can eliminate the need for a bulky camera notch jutting into the screen, like the one in current iPhones. The amount of space saved by forgoing traditional lens elements will enable more phone makers to put sensors and cameras beneath a device's glass display, something we'll see more of this year.
Devlin says the applications for Metalenz reach beyond smartphones. The technology can be used in everything from instruments for health care to augmented- and virtual-reality cameras, to the cameras in automobiles.
Take spectroscopy as an example. A spectrometer is used to finely detect different wavelengths of light, and it's commonly employed in medical assays to identify particular molecules in the blood. As metasurfaces allow you to collapse “a tabletop of optics into a single surface,” Devlin claims you can pop the right sensors in a smartphone with Metalenz to do the same kind of work.
“You can actually look at the chemical signature of fruit with a spectrometer and tell whether it's ripe,” Devlin says. “It's really not just an image anymore, you're actually accessing all sorts of different forms of sense, and seeing and interacting with the world, getting a whole new set of information into the cellphone.”
Also:
A New Lens Technology Is Primed to Jump-Start Phone Cameras
