The cameras in our phones, laptops, and increasingly home robots and the like are about as small as they can get unless we starting doing something different, and that’s just what Metalenz is getting up to — with great success and now a $30 million funding round to expand its ultra-small 3D imaging tech.
The startup appeared in 2021 with a fresh take on cameras that abandons the approach we’ve used for decades, basically “a normal camera and lens but small.” Instead, it uses a complex but nearly 2D surface to capture light passing through a single lens, allowing the whole unit to be a fraction of the size. It’s not meant for taking clear ordinary images but providing the kind of extra info needed by those cameras — depth, object and material recognition, and so on.
We’ve seen this type of thing before, but usually in university research labs
