Notches in today’s smartphones have been largely replaced with floating punch-hole cameras, which 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 Dynamic Island, which debuted on the iPhone 14. The iPhone also has the largest camera cutout today, thanks to the Face ID biometric authentication system. (With the exception of Google Pixel phones, most Android phones don’t offer the secure facial authentication equivalent, so they don’t need the bulky camera cutout.) This island could get much smaller, however, thanks to new under-display camera technology announced at Display Week 2026 by Metalenz, a Boston-based optics startup.
A primer on metasurfaces
Metalenz’s Optical Metasurface 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, but in short, instead of refracting light through multiple plastic or glass lens elements — which improves image clarity, corrects aberrations, and brings more light into the camera sensor — metasurfaces use a single lens with nanostructures to bend light rays toward the sensor.
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 aid in camera autofocus.
The company has also pioneered a method of using these metasurfaces to capture polarization data. When light hits an object with specific physical properties, it creates a unique polarization signature. Light reflected from black ice has a different polarization signature than light reflected from the road. Using machine learning algorithms, it enables a system that can instantly identify black ice on the road and alert the driver.
Photograph: Courtesy of Metalenz
That’s why the company has developed Polar ID, a facial authentication platform to compete with Apple’s Face ID. With polarization data, its sensors can distinguish the real face of a person wearing a 3D mask with extremely accurate accuracy, because the polarization information from light bouncing off the human’s skin is unique compared to light bouncing off the mask’s silicone. Yes, it’s even more secure than Google’s face unlock system on Pixels, which can be tricked with a high-quality 3D mask.
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