Researchers have come up with a new technology to deliver augmented and virtual reality glasses that don’t look like “bug eyes.”
“Image” is everything in the $20 billion market for AR/VR glasses. Consumers are looking for glasses that are compact and easy to wear, delivering high-quality imagery with socially acceptable optics.
In a new paper in
Science Advances, researchers describe imprinting freeform optics with a nanophotonic optical element called “a metasurface.”
The metasurface is a veritable forest of tiny, silver, nanoscale structures on a thin metallic film that conforms, in this advance, to the freeform shape of the optics—realizing a new optical component the researchers call a metaform.