We're all too familiar with the notch—the unsightly cut-in that graced many smartphones for years, like the iPhone X or the LG G7.
The notch has largely been replaced on today’s smartphones by floating punch-hole cameras that take up less space and look a little more futuristic, though notches are still prevalent on some laptops, like Apple’s MacBooks.
On the iPhone, Apple calls its floating pill-shaped camera system the Dynamic Island, which debuted on the iPhone 14. The iPhone still has the largest camera cutout today, due to its Face ID biometric authentication system. (Barring Google Pixel phones, the vast majority of Android phones don't offer a secure face authentication equivalent, so they don't need a bulky camera cutout.) This island could get much smaller, however, thanks to new under-display camera technology announced at Display Week 2026 from Metalenz, a optics startup from Boston.
A Primer on Metasurfaces
Metalenz’s optical metasurfaces technology is a flat-lens system that uses a fraction of the space of traditional multi-lens elements in most smartphones. You can read more about it in our original coverage of the company here, but in short, instead of refracting light through multiple plastic or glass lens elements—which improves image clarity, corrects aberrations, and brings more light to the camera sensor—metasurfaces use a single lens with nanostructures to bend light rays toward the sensors.
Metalenz says more than 300 million of its metasurfaces are already used in consumer devices today, replacing bulky traditional optics in time-of-flight sensors that capture depth information and assist with a camera's autofocus.
The company also pioneered a method to use these metasurfaces to capture polarization data. When light hits an object with specific material properties, it creates a unique polarization signature. Light reflecting off black ice has a different polarization signature from light reflecting off the road. Using machine learning algorithms, this enables a system that can quickly identify black ice on the road and alert the driver.
That's why the company developed Polar ID, a facial authentication platform to rival Apple's Face ID. With polarization data, its sensors can distinguish a real face from someone wearing an eerily accurate 3D mask of the same person, because the polarization information from light bouncing off a human's skin is unique compared to light bouncing off the silicone of the mask. Yes, it's even more secure than Google's face unlock system on Pixels, which can be spoofed with a high-quality 3D mask.
Metalenz announced a partnership with Qualcomm in late 2023 to scale it up, and now this Polar ID face-recognition system is finally ready for mass production. It will be deployed on consumer devices—laptops and smartphones—in 2027. Its rollout could mean that Android finally gets a Face ID equivalent, with components that use less space than Apple's TrueDepth camera system, and unlike Google's face unlock, it isn’t affected by bright light or dim environments.
“We've now proven with multiple third parties that have done testing that we meet the highest security standards they have in terms of performance, in terms of keeping out masks and any mask of any quality,” Rob Devlin, CEO of Metalenz, tells WIRED.
But the next step? Making those components disappear from view.
The Under-Display Camera
At Display Week, a display technology convention in Los Angeles, Metalenz showed off how its Polar ID system could work underneath an OLED display. You'll still have a selfie camera visible on the screen for, you know, selfies. But the Polar ID system would sit next to it under the display, where it’s effectively invisible.
This isn't the first time we've seen under-display cameras—Samsung famously employed one on several iterations of its Galaxy Z Fold folding smartphone—but image quality greatly suffers when the camera is stuffed under the display. This is likely why Samsung switched to a traditional punch-hole camera on its latest Z Fold7.
That isn't much of a problem with a sensor designed to capture polarization data. Devlin says the signal does get slightly distorted by hiding under the display, and you lose some intensity, but the polarization information largely remains unchanged. You can see in the example image above—the top three images are what the traditional Polar ID sensor sees, and the set below is what it sees when Polar ID is underneath an OLED display.
The display needs a thinned-out section to house the Polar ID sensor, meaning this system requires tight integration with the display manufacturer. But adding that thinner region should not affect panel quality. (Devlin says the company is in early conversations with a few of the bigger smartphone manufacturers but didn’t divulge details.) “You can't really even tell that there is a thinned-out region,” Devlin says about the display.
Over a video call, I watched a demo of Devlin testing Polar ID under OLED, and the system had no trouble authenticating his face or discerning when he was wearing a 3D mask.
“Folks have decided to differentiate along a continuous display versus Apple’s interrupted display,” Devlin says. “So I think this is also something that can really offer face unlock in a truly seamless manner—seamless in the sense that you don't even feel like you're securely unlocking your phone when you are.”
You can imagine that this under-display camera could prove useful not just in phones but in laptops that want to eliminate the notch for a continuous display. While Polar ID will arrive on devices in 2027, Devlin says the under-display version is likely an extra year out and should land in the market in 2028.
Smartphone companies have long been infatuated with an uninterrupted screen experience while minimizing the black bars around the panel, with some, like Samsung, exploring under-display cameras and others even trying pop-up cameras that mechanically rise up out of the phone's frame. It is likely why Android phone makers haven't fully adopted a Face ID-like biometric authentication system: The hardware was too bulky and expensive to justify interrupting a beautiful, edge-to-edge display. Polar ID’s solution might finally give them the security they need without the “island” they've been trying to avoid.
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