FLATulence Your View: MetaOptics

 Clayton Yun

Professor Horgan

HST 401

28 January 2026

FLATulence Your View: MetaOptics

Have you ever been in that moment when you’re bending over at the doctor's office right as you’re about to get your first colonoscopy, and wondered, “WOW! That tube camera thing is quite BIG”? No? Well, you’re lucky. For NOW! That “camera tube” is known as an endoscope, and it uses optical fibers that are basically tiny glass tubes with other components to make sure that the signals don’t die off and help transmit light through the cable with minimal distortions to help view the insides so that the doctors can make sure you are healthy. 

Endoscopes, along with almost everything that has become crucial to our lives, utilize optical components and systems to deliver us these technologies. 

Conventionally, lenses and mirrors are the foundation. Lenses and mirrors are usually a piece of glass or metal that has been ground down into a shape and polished to the point that they are so flat they let most of the light through or reflect off of them. There have been countless advancements that have made these optics so that they deliver better image quality, less distortion, and for longer ranges. However, the two biggest limitations were that they had a very limited range of focus that a single lens could produce, and the thickness of the lens was limited. 

As of the 2010s, research into a new “lens” was underway in meta-optics. They envisioned that they could use millions of nanoscaled structures “printed” onto a wafer, like semiconductors, each smaller than the wavelength of light, to create tiny elements that act like antennas to control how light behaves. The nanostructures could adjust the phase, amplitude, and polarization of the light that passed through, depending on how it was shaped. Furthermore, they have the ability to change their optical properties, like focal point and the wavelength at which the optic operates, with simple currents passing through the nanostructures, allowing for a wide range of operations. In addition, these lenses themselves could do part of the computing that is necessary to turn those light inputs into electrical signals and other data points that allow us to view a photo taken from a camera or perform mathematical calculations, like in quantum computing. 

As of recently, there have been many labs and manufacturing companies that have harnessed and honed their machines to make these metaoptics. Companies like MetaOptics and Metalenz have been growing and producing metalenses, turning academic designs into physical, testable lenses for further commercial use cases. 

Metaoptics can and will transform the industry standard as they are much smaller, efficient, and smarter. Right now, lenses can get as thin as a few millimeters; however, with this advancement, they would be thinner than a strand of human hair. The autonomous vehicle industry will be greatly affected to as the metaoptics can compute and store light data with depth information, allowing for better precision in self-driving cars, and are also more efficient energy-wise and will help cars like the Cybertruck get more mileage and better self-driving than how they do now, since people that drive them can’t properly drive anyways. 

Another field that will greatly improve will be the medical field and accessibility for people who need medical imaging done, as many of the imaging systems will become more compact and more energy efficient. 

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington have been designing meta-optics to be used in endoscopes to effectively shorten the current endoscopes’ optical tip length to about a third of its size. This will not only make endoscopy procedures less daunting but also better. Using a meta-optic will allow the doctors to see the whole range of the visible spectrum with the lens, which the current one lacks, helping them give a better diagnosis and realtime view of their surgical operations. In addition, the smaller size allows the endoscopes to be more flexible and will give access to tighter anatomical places with reduced patient trauma for better recovery.

Although the day that meta-optics becomes the new standard is still a mile away, we are progressing along the path towards. With more and more companies investing in research and development to turn these theories and designs into real-life applications and products, I believe that we are close to fearing colonoscopies a bit less than we do today.

WORK CITED

Dumé, Isabelle. “Meta-Optical Fibres Downsize Endoscopes.” Physics World, 26 July 2023, physicsworld.com/a/meta-optical-fibres-downsize-endoscopes/. Accessed 29 Jan. 2026.

Froch, Johannes E., et al. “Real Time Full-Color Imaging in a Meta-Optical Fiber Endoscope | Elight | Full Text.” SpringerNatureLink, 7 June 2023, elight.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43593-023-00044-4. Accessed 29 Jan. 2026.

Megahd, Heba. “Large Metalenses Are Produced on a Mass Scale.” Physics World, 26 May 2023, physicsworld.com/a/large-metalenses-are-produced-on-a-mass-scale/. Accessed 29 Jan. 2026. 

Poulton, Kristin. “Manufacturing Medical Devices: How Endoscopes Are Made.” QAD Blog, 9 Dec. 2020, www.qad.com/blog/2020/12/manufacturing-medical-devices-how-endoscopes-are-made. Accessed 29 Jan. 2026. 

Yueqiang Hu et al. ,Metaoptics merging computational optics and optical computing toward intelligent visual perception.Sci. Adv.12,eaea8941(2026).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aea8941