This Company Has Figured Out a Way to Make Face ID Invisible

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. 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