We’re all too conversant in the notch—the unpleasant cut-in that graced many smartphones for years, just like the iPhone X or the LG G7.
The notch has largely been changed on immediately’s smartphones by floating punch-hole cameras that take up much less area and look just a little extra futuristic, although notches are nonetheless prevalent on some laptops, like Apple’s MacBooks.
On the iPhone, Apple calls its floating pill-shaped digital camera system the Dynamic Island, which debuted on the iPhone 14. The iPhone nonetheless has the most important digital camera cutout immediately, resulting from 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 digital camera cutout.) This island may get a lot smaller, nevertheless, because of new under-display digital camera expertise introduced at Display Week 2026 from Metalenz, a optics startup from Boston.
A Primer on Metasurfaces
Metalenz’s optical metasurfaces expertise is a flat-lens system that makes use of a fraction of the area of conventional multi-lens parts in most smartphones. You’ll be able to read more about it in our original coverage of the company here, however in brief, as a substitute of refracting mild via a number of plastic or glass lens parts—which improves picture readability, corrects aberrations, and brings extra mild to the digital camera sensor—metasurfaces use a single lens with nanostructures to bend mild rays towards the sensors.
Metalenz says greater than 300 million of its metasurfaces are already utilized in client gadgets immediately, changing cumbersome conventional optics in time-of-flight sensors that seize depth data and help with a digital camera’s autofocus.
The corporate additionally pioneered a technique to make use of these metasurfaces to capture polarization data. When mild hits an object with particular materials properties, it creates a singular polarization signature. Mild reflecting off black ice has a unique polarization signature from mild reflecting off the highway. Utilizing machine studying algorithms, this permits a system that may shortly determine black ice on the highway 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 knowledge, its sensors can distinguish an actual face from somebody carrying an eerily correct 3D masks of the identical individual, as a result of the polarization data from mild bouncing off a human’s pores and skin is exclusive in comparison with mild bouncing off the silicone of the masks. Sure, it is much more safe than Google’s face unlock system on Pixels, which could be spoofed with a high-quality 3D masks.
