Imagine a camera mounted on your car can identify black ice on the road, keeping you alert before driving through it. Or a cell phone camera could tell if a wound in your skin could be cancerous. Or the ability for Face ID to work even if you have one wearing a mask. Here are all the possibilities Metalenz is touting its new PolarEyes polarizing technology.
Last year, the company unveiled a flat lens system called optical supersurface for mobile devices that take up less space while intentionally producing images of similar quality – if not better than with traditional smartphone cameras. Instead of using multiple stacked lens elements — a design used in most phone cameras, which requires a bulky “camera head” — Metalenz’s solution relies on a single tube. The only glass equipped with a nanostructure that bends light rays and delivers them to the sensor’s camera, producing images with a level of brightness and clarity on par with those captured with traditional systems. Rob Devlin, CEO of Metalenz, says we’ll see this technology in a product in Q2 2022.
However, consider Metalenz’s latest announcement as a second-generation version that could appear inside devices in 2023. It’s built on the same technology, but the nanostructures can now be maintained. maintain polarization information under light. Normal cameras, like the ones in our phones, don’t collect this data, but only focus on light intensity and color. But with an additional data stream, our phones can soon learn some new tricks.
Wait, What is Polarity?
Light is a type of electromagnetic radiation, and it travels in waves. When light interacts with certain objects, like crystals, its waveform changes and begins to oscillate with a single signal.
“The polarization information really tells you about the direction of the light,” says Devlin. will take a very different direction depending on what material, what molecule, what it’s actually made of. With that information, you can get this contrast and understand what everything is made of. ”
Close-up of the nanostructure on Metalenz’s design.
Photo: MetalenzThink of it this way: Light waves emitted by ordinary ice on the side of the road will oscillate differently than light emitted by black ice. If the camera can collect this information, you can feed it to a computer vision machine learning algorithm and train it to learn the difference between black tape and normal tape. Now the car can notify you of upcoming danger.
