{"id":9865,"date":"2024-02-26T19:50:48","date_gmt":"2024-02-26T19:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=9865"},"modified":"2024-02-26T19:50:48","modified_gmt":"2024-02-26T19:50:48","slug":"polar-id-is-the-face-id-rival-for-android-phones-and-could-even-beat-apple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=9865","title":{"rendered":"Polar ID Is the Face ID Rival for Android Phones, and Could Even Beat Apple"},"content":{"rendered":"


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A little more<\/span> than six years ago, Apple unveiled Face ID. It was a new method to biometrically unlock iPhones<\/a> and authenticate purchases by scanning your face. Yet after all this time, there still hasn\u2019t been a meaningful competitor on Android\u2014at least, not with the same level of security and capabilities.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s Pixel 8<\/a> has Face Unlock, but it has trouble working in the dark; the Face Unlock available on Samsung smartphones can\u2019t be used for secure applications, such as banking. In Androidland, the fingerprint scanner is king, but that might not be the case for long.<\/p>\n

Metalenz, a startup pioneering optics technology called \u201coptical metasurfaces,\u201d is hard at work on introducing secure face authentication to Android with its Polar ID<\/a> technology. Late last year, it announced a partnership with Qualcomm<\/a> to port its ongoing development to the chipmaker\u2019s flagship processor. Today, at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, it announced that it will be using Samsung\u2019s Isocell Vizion 931 image sensor to power its imaging system.<\/p>\n

I visited Metalenz\u2019s headquarters in Boston to get a first look at Polar ID. The system is still in its early stages, and the company is currently gathering large amounts of data to improve its facial recognition machine learning algorithms. But it has plans to send development kits to smartphone manufacturers in the middle of this year for testing, which means there\u2019s a good chance we\u2019ll see a Face ID\u2013like system for Android, one that\u2019s potentially better than Apple\u2019s approach, inside smartphones by early 2026.<\/p>\n

New Optics<\/p>\n

Metalenz is a startup born out of a research group at Harvard University and was founded by CEO Robert Devlin and physicist Federico Capasso. I\u2019ve been covering its development ever since the company emerged from stealth mode in 2021. That\u2019s when it unveiled its metasurfaces technology<\/a>\u2014a flat-lens system that takes up far less space than the traditional multi-lens elements used in most smartphones today.<\/p>\n

The iPhone 14 Pro<\/a>, for example, has seven lens elements (layers of glass or plexiglass) stacked above the camera sensor. Having multiple lens elements improves image clarity, captures more light, and corrects issues such as chromatic aberration (where colors are visible on the fringes of images). But it also adds more complexity and requires more space in the smartphone. Metalenz\u2019s metasurfaces is a single lens that uses nanostructures<\/a> to bend light rays toward the camera sensor, performing the job of multiple lens elements in a much smaller package.<\/p>\n

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