Ultimately, the comfort of using augmented reality glasses will be determined by their weight, which largely depends on the lenses and glass of these gadgets. The lenses direct the light of a miniature projector onto the retina of the eye, which makes them quite complex and bulky. Today, Samsung, together with scientists, has found a way to make them even thinner – up to 1.5 mm.
Image Source: Samsung
The stated thickness of the developed lenses is approximately a third of the thickness of the lenses used in current commercial devices. Key element of development became metasurface – a structure with nanometer elements whose dimensions are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. It allows you to control the phase and direction of light propagation, reducing its loss inside the transparent lens. The results of the study were published on November 11, 2026 in the journal Nature. The authors of the work are stated to be scientists from the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and researchers from Samsung Research.
Traditional AR glasses use diffractive optical elements inside the glasses to redirect images from the projector to the user’s eye. The light is reflected many times inside the lens, actually propagating along the waveguide, but some of the radiation is scattered one way or another. This reduces the brightness of the image, and an increase in the lens area is accompanied by additional light loss.
In the new work, the researchers placed a metasurface consisting of specially formed nanostructures in the waveguide region. The geometry (shape and size) and distance between nanoelements on this surface were selected in such a way that the direction of the light depended on the angle and point of its entry. Additionally, to form a full-color image, the researchers combined two waveguide layers: one designed to transmit blue and green light, the second – red and green.
The developed optical system made it possible to obtain a brighter image while maintaining power consumption at a level comparable to that of existing devices. Essentially, the metasurface nanostructures reduced light loss that would otherwise be higher due to multiple reflections from the walls of the waveguide on its way to the user’s pupil. According to the researchers, the prototype provided good readability of white text in bright daylight, and indoors, a full-color image was maintained even when the display power was reduced to 30% of the original level.
By and large, we are talking not just about reducing the thickness of the lens, but about trying to simultaneously solve several problems: maintaining brightness, ensuring a sufficient field of view and reducing the size of the optics. However, the development remains a prototype for now. For further commercialization, the researchers will have to achieve similar performance using one waveguide layer instead of two, and also reduce the rainbow halos and blurring that occur when external light interacts with nanostructures. However, the developers expect to bring glasses with new optics to the market within three years.
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