We’re all too conversant in the notch—the ugly cut-in that graced many smartphones for years, just like the iPhone X or the LG G7.
The notch has largely been changed on right this moment’s smartphones by floating punch-hole cameras that take up much less house and look a bit extra futuristic, although notches are nonetheless prevalent on some laptops, like Apple’s MacBooks.
On the iPhone, Apple calls its floating pill-shaped digicam system the Dynamic Island, which debuted on the iPhone 14. The iPhone nonetheless has the most important digicam cutout right this moment, attributable to its Face ID biometric authentication system. (Barring Google Pixel phones, the overwhelming majority of Android phones do not supply a secure face authentication equivalent, so they do not want a cumbersome digicam cutout.) This island might get a lot smaller, nevertheless, because of new under-display digicam know-how introduced at Display Week 2026 from Metalenz, a optics startup from Boston.
A Primer on Metasurfaces
Metalenz’s optical metasurfaces know-how is a flat-lens system that makes use of a fraction of the house of conventional multi-lens parts in most smartphones. You possibly can read more about it in our original coverage of the company here, however in brief, as an alternative of refracting gentle by way of a number of plastic or glass lens parts—which improves picture readability, corrects aberrations, and brings extra gentle to the digicam sensor—metasurfaces use a single lens with nanostructures to bend gentle rays towards the sensors.
Metalenz says greater than 300 million of its metasurfaces are already utilized in client gadgets right this moment, changing cumbersome conventional optics in time-of-flight sensors that seize depth data and help with a digicam’s autofocus.
The corporate additionally pioneered a technique to make use of these metasurfaces to capture polarization data. When gentle hits an object with particular materials properties, it creates a singular polarization signature. Mild reflecting off black ice has a special polarization signature from gentle reflecting off the street. Utilizing machine studying algorithms, this allows a system that may rapidly determine black ice on the street and alert the motive force.
{Photograph}: Courtesy of Metalenz
That is why the corporate developed Polar ID, a facial authentication platform to rival Apple’s Face ID. With polarization information, its sensors can distinguish an actual face from somebody sporting an eerily correct 3D masks of the identical particular person, as a result of the polarization data from gentle bouncing off a human’s pores and skin is exclusive in comparison with gentle bouncing off the silicone of the masks. Sure, it is much more safe than Google’s face unlock system on Pixels, which may be spoofed with a high-quality 3D masks.
