// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
Exclusive: Your Smartphone Camera Could Get a Big Upgrade With This Tech
One of the most essential pieces of technology that makes your phone’s camera work was created in 1974, and it hasn’t changed much since.
When you snap a photo with your smartphone, the camera captures light and converts it into electrical signals to build a digital image. But the Bayer filter—a red, green, and blue layer that sits above the sensor and adds color to your images—absorbs and wastes around 60 percent of that light before it can reach the sensor. To make a red pixel, the filter blocks and throws away blue and green light.
Now, the Boston company Metalenz has acquired an Israeli startup called PxE Holographic Imaging, which has developed a new optical layer called a HoloCoder. This microscopic structure sits directly on top of the image sensor and diffracts light, bending the light waves rather than absorbing them.
With the HoloCoder redirecting the light waves toward the sensor’s pixels instead of blocking them, the camera sensor can collect up to a claimed 2.5 times more light. Such a leap in light-gathering ability could dramatically improve a smartphone's low-light photography and dynamic range.
There's a surprising secondary benefit too: HoloCoder technology can capture 3D depth information at the same time. Most smartphones use secondary cameras, dedicated depth sensors, or AI guesswork to figure out the distance between the camera and the subject in order to judge how much depth should be shown in features like portrait mode. By merging light sensing and depth sensing into one layer, the HoloCoder promises to simplify the electronics on the back of your smartphone, saving space and processing power.
Some layers are no longer required on a camera system using PxE’s HoloCoder technology.
The acquisition of PxE—details of which were not disclosed—makes sense for Metalenz. The company launched publicly in 2021 and pioneered the commercialization of metasurfaces, a flat-lens system with nanostructures that bend light, reducing the need for multiple lens elements over the camera sensor while also capturing more light. The company has shipped more than 300 million of these metasurface optics to consumer devices today.
The technology can also capture polarization data, and Metalenz is working with Qualcomm to create a more effective, secure facial biometric authentication system for Android called Polar ID to rival Apple's Face ID, expected to arrive on consumer devices at the end of 2027.
Rob Devlin, Metalenz CEO and cofounder, tells WIRED that PxE's approach mirrors his own company's by patterning microscopic structures directly onto an image sensor to unlock light data that conventional camera systems throw away.
A New Lens Technology Is Primed to Jump-Start Phone Cameras