Metalenz’s PolarEyes camera technology brings polarization data to smartphones

imagine a camera It’s mounted on your car and is able to identify black ice on the road, giving you a hint before you drive over it. Or a phone camera could tell if a lesion on your skin might be cancerous.Or work even if you have Face ID wear a mask. These are possible Elemental Its new PolarEyes polarization technology is being advertised.

Last year, the company introduced a flat lens system optical metasurface Suitable for mobile devices that take up less space, it is said to produce images of similar quality to traditional smartphone cameras—if not better. Rather than using multiple lens elements stacked on top of each other (a design used in most cell phone cameras, which requires a bulky “camera bump”), Metalenz’s solution relies on a single lens equipped with a nanostructure that Light can be bent and passed to the camera’s sensor, producing images with brightness and clarity comparable to photos captured by conventional systems. Metalenz CEO Rob Devlin said we will see the technology in products in the second quarter of 2022.

However, consider Metalenz’s newly released second-gen version, which could appear inside devices in 2023. It’s built on the same technology, but the nanostructures can now preserve polarization information under light. Normal cameras, like those in our phones, don’t capture this data, but only focus on light intensity and color. But with that extra stream of data, our phones may soon learn some new tricks.

Wait, what is polarization?

Light is a type of electromagnetic radiation that travels in the form of waves. When light interacts with certain objects, such as crystals, its waveform changes and begins to oscillate with unique characteristics.

“The polarization information can really tell you the direction of the light,” Devlin said. When light enters the camera after bouncing off smooth and rough objects, or after hitting an edge or interacting with certain molecules, it “depends on the With what material, what molecule, what does it actually bounce off of, there’s a very different direction. With that information, you can get this contrast and understand what things are made of.”

Think of it this way: Light waves reflected off normal ice on the side of the road oscillate differently than light waves reflected off black ice. If the camera can get this information, you can feed it into a computer vision machine learning algorithm and train it to learn the difference between black ice and normal ice. Now the car can inform you of impending danger.