AR & VR lens expertise firm Imagia raises $4.5M

Could 2, 2023 – Imagia, a developer of next-generation lens expertise, has just lately introduced the shut of a USD $4.5M seed spherical. Led by Gates Frontier and joined by MetaVC Companions and different strategic traders, the funding will assist Imagia to speed up the event and preliminary industrial deployment of the corporate’s first era of flat, silicon-based optical lenses.

Imagia said that its metalens expertise can shrink a complete optical meeting right into a planar, wafer-thin system, leading to a dramatic discount in measurement and complexity for optical assemblies. In response to Imagia, utilizing a patent-pending strategy, the corporate’s expertise can exactly sample nanoscale buildings immediately onto varied substrates, creating utterly flat metalenses that steer gentle waves by design, and with out the necessity for conventional curved lenses. The lenses will be sq. or spherical, and will be made as small as a single pixel on a digital show.

Imagia famous that makers of complicated optoelectronic merchandise reminiscent of augmented and digital actuality (AR/VR) headsets are always having to make tradeoffs between ergonomic kind and optical operate as a result of constraints and limitations of conventional bulk optics. These limitations not apply with metalenses, which afford producers extra optical design flexibility to attain higher-performing merchandise with a discount in measurement, weight and complexity, in response to Imagia.

The corporate additionally claims that its strategy permits for utterly new system architectures; its metalenses will be constructed immediately on prime of CMOS* gadgets like LEDs and picture sensors in the identical fabrication circulate, which eliminates a number of important steps of opto-mechanical alignment.

*Complementary metal-oxide semiconductors are the semiconductor expertise utilized in most of in the present day’s microchips. 

“Metamaterials are a real paradigm shift in the best way we manipulate gentle, akin to the shift from analog to digital computing,” mentioned Greg Kress, CEO of Imagia. “Conventional glass lenses have been round for a whole lot of years. The inherent constraints of working with most of these lenses lead to complicated, cumbersome optical assemblies that require exact mechanical alignments. Imagia adjustments that strategy by constructing lenses like built-in circuits, one thing that was not potential till very just lately.”

At present on the prototype stage, Imagia said that its metalens expertise has demonstrated an general discount in optical system quantity by >90% in quite a lot of purposes together with light-weight, high-performance AR glasses and next-generation holographic shows. The corporate added that it is usually working to put the muse to develop into picture sensing lens design, with the intention to carry important advantages to smartphone digicam, satellite tv for pc and pc imaginative and prescient system design, in response to Imagia.

“We’re agency believers that the following era of AR glasses can be powered by this sort of metalens expertise,” mentioned David Bonelli, Founder & CEO of Pulsar, the AR {hardware} and optics design agency behind Red6’s ATARS and NuEyes’s NuLoupes. “Imagia’s metalens expertise guarantees to open up new frontiers in optical design that had been beforehand unattainable.”

Imagia added that it’s now working in partnership with Pulsar to discover future purposes for metalenses.

Based by Greg Kress, a Stanford PhD engineer, and led by a workforce of optical physicists and supplies science engineers, Imagia is aiming to reshape the following era of high-performance optoelectronics gadgets by its patent-pending metalens expertise, and using proprietary, silicon-based optical supplies and state-of-the-art lithography instruments. 

Imagia famous that it’s at present creating merchandise for patrons in augmented actuality shows and LED illumination. For extra data on Imagia and its next-generation lens expertise for the XR business, please go to the corporate’s website.

Picture credit score: Imagia

Sam Sprigg

Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in analysis and report writing, he has been protecting XR business information for the previous 5 years.