Nanoscopic Optical Metamaterial

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-metasurface-optical-fields-dimensions.html

This is one of those surprise inventions many thought would require a few more decades to produce, and how soon it will be used in commercial applications is anyone's guess. Nobody's ever made optics that are remotely like this, because its similar to a nanoscopic pinhole camera, but one that can focus light as well. Theoretically, you could make wallpaper out of the stuff and have it capture almost all the light hitting the wall, which can already be done with sound to create the perfect microphone, that doesn't introduce any noise whatsoever into the signal. Ideally, you would want such an optical device to capture the lightfield data, which would mean if you played the video back you could focus your eyes anywhere in the picture as if you were actually there.

This is the kind of technology required to turn a rather ordinary looking pair of sunglasses into a high powered VR headset that produces 8k resolution images that are virtually indistinguishable from the real deal, and runs off a single AAA battery. You don't have to worry about bulky lenses or the field of view or any of that, because it can replace them all inside what is essentially a few millimeters thick of metamaterial. Combined with plasmonic circuitry, you could create an entirely optical system that can manipulate images with perfect fidelity however you prefer. Using lightfields, they could literally beam the images right into your eyeball and have them form right in front of your retina. Its just light, at a low power at that, so it can't hurt your eyes or anything.

But, all that is many years away. What they can do with it in the meantime should still prove interesting to say the least. Optics have been around since Galileo, so there's a lot of science and technology already behind them, and you can bet people will take this new technology as far as they can, just as fast as they can. Already we have flat lenses coming on the market that can enable a cellphone to act like a two foot telescope, allowing you to watch Jupiter's moons or the horizon on your cellphone, but this means they can do just about anything they want, and we'll just have to wait and see what comes next. Flat lenses don't allow you to bend light around corners or anything light that, but this kind of technology should be able to bend light around a 90 degree turn without any loss, and allow you manipulate it countless other ways.