AS effortless as Apple’s Face ID is at allowing you to securely authenticate your identity, the feature comes with several drawbacks, not the least of which being a hideous notch at the top of your iPhone’s screen.

Metalenz, a company spun out of Harvard University, believes it has a better approach to facial biometrics: a new lens technology that uses polarized light for improved security that can also be hidden beneath a smartphone’s screen. Metalenz, as the company’s name implies, was founded on relatively new technology known as metalenses (and metasurfaces) that promises to revolutionize cameras and the approach to making lenses we’ve used for over 150 years.

Most cameras rely on a lens that’s actually made up of several stacked lens elements that are each strategically shaped and arranged to bend light and direct it towards a sensor with minimal distortions and aberrations introduced along the way. This approach produces very sharp images, but at a cost: size.

Manufacturing camera lenses is an exacting process, requiring elements to be perfectly curved and polished to bend and redirect light as it passes through, which is why a good lens for your camera can cost thousands of dollars.

Metalenses take an entirely different approach to the problem. Instead of a perfectly smooth and curved finish, metalenses are thin and completely flat with a surface covered in thousands of microscopic nanostructures laid out in patterns that look like a series of concentric circles. These nanostructures effectively do the same thing the curved surface of a traditional lens element does, bending and redirecting light, but just a single metalens is needed to produce results as good, if not better, than current lens technology allows.

The benefits of using metalenses are numerous. They can be manufactured en masse, using the same equipment used to make microchips, which makes them much cheaper to implement in consumer devices. A single lens also means more light is hitting a camera sensor, improving its ability to capture images in low light. But more importantly, metalenses promise to eliminate camera bumps on smartphones, and soon, that ugly notch at the top of your iPhone’s screen.

Metalenz’s new version of its metalens technology called PolarEyes allows camera sensors to capture polarized light information that traditional camera systems typically ignore.

Cameras that can capture polarized light aren’t a new idea, but they’re expensive and typically used in research, engineering, or medical fields for things like visually detecting skin cancer, spotting air pollution, and even studying the stresses on an object to preemptively detect areas that might fail or break. Metalenz believes the technology can benefit consumers, too, because its approach makes the technology cheap enough to stuff in a smartphone.

Many facial recognition features can be easily fooled by high-quality masks or even printed headshots. But the polarized light bouncing off the skin of a human face looks distinctly different from the polarized light bouncing off a silicone mask or a printout, and the differences are easy to spot without complicated image-recognition algorithms or dedicated processors.

Not only would Metalenz PolarEyes potentially help make security features like Face ID more secure, it would still work when only half a user’s face can be detected (i.e. when they are responsibly masked).(SD-Agencies)