A little more than six years ago, Apple unveiled Face ID. It was a new method to biometrically unlock iPhones and authenticate purchases by scanning your face. Google's Pixel 8 has face unlock, but it has trouble working in the dark; the face unlock available on Samsung smartphones can't be used for secure applications, such as banking. In Android land, the fingerprint scanner is king, but that might not be the case for long. Metalenz, a startup pioneering optics technology called "optical metasurfaces," is hard at work on introducing secure face authentication to Android with its Polar ID technology.

Imagine a camera that's mounted on your car being able to identify black ice on the road, giving you a heads-up before you drive over it. Or a cell phone camera that can tell whether a lesion on your skin is possibly cancerous. Or the ability for Face ID to work even when you have a face mask on. These are all possibilities Metalenz is touting with its new PolarEyes polarization technology. Last year, the company unveiled a flat-lens system called optical metasurfaces for mobile devices that took up less space while purportedly producing similar- if not better-quality images than a traditional smartphone camera.