While this article isn't great at articulating the potential benefits of this field, within the next few years we'll see some fruit blossom for sure, and it will impact a lot of diverse areas, such as:

Enhanced imaging and diagnostic capabilities: The ability to resolve features at the subwavelength scale could revolutionize fields such as biology, medicine, and materials science, allowing for the study and understanding of phenomena at an unprecedented level of detail. This could lead to new discoveries and advances in a wide range of fields.

Improved sensing and detection: Enhanced sensitivity of sensors could enable the detection of subtle changes in the environment and allow for the development of new sensing technologies. This could have applications in fields such as healthcare, security, and environmental monitoring.

Increased energy efficiency: The ability to more efficiently absorb and convert light into electricity could lead to more efficient solar cells and other renewable energy technologies, helping to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Improved telecommunications: The development of new types of devices and materials for use in telecommunications systems could enable faster and more efficient communication over long distances.

Meta-optics is a new disruptive technology that didn't even exist a few years ago.

The technology has the potential to revolutionize many industries, including communications, robotics and health care. It involves the manipulation of light on the nanoscale using specially designed structures called metasurfaces.

Metasurfaces are collections of tiny elements that can be engineered to modify light in various ways, such as controlling its phase or polarization in order to create desired optical effects.

The potential applications of meta-optics include ultrafast optical switching and storage devices; high-resolution imaging systems; integration into robots with vision capabilities; noninvasive medical diagnostics; energy harvesting and optical communications systems.

In addition, meta-optics could be used to optimize solar cells for improved efficiency and reliability or to reduce eye strain from displays by changing their appearance depending on viewing angles.

Meta-optics is an emerging field due to recent advances in fabrication methods for metasurfaces and the development of new materials which can better interact with light at the nanoscale level than ever before. This will likely spur further research as well as commercialization efforts as businesses seek out ways to capitalize on this new technology's potential benefits.

Yo this comments section is wack

For anyone wondering the obvious "tell me the downside/why it won't hit the markets anytime soon."

But the authors also found challenges for the field. The first of these is the ability to scale up to industrial processes that are compatible with the current industry standard CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) manufacturing techniques—especially because most meta-optical components rely on a transparent substrate, which CMOS is not.

Secondly, they found the ability to make tunable or reconfigurable metamaterials to enable dynamic components—just as the pixels on a TV screen can change color many times per second—was elusive.

"This is an unsolved problem that we put forward as the main challenge for the field. It's the key element for the field, everybody needs it now," Professor Neshev said.

"There is a misconception that it has been done—people do a small step and in their papers project to a faraway future. But no one can actually modulate the phase at a pixel level for a large array."

If these challenges can be solved then meta-optics technology has enormous potential, Professor Neshev said.

Looks incredibly interesting. Game changing, as posted, but those are some significant obstacles to overcome.

The most obvious thing to point out is the “Meta-Optics” is not related to Meta - aka Facebook… once I figured that out, I actually read the article and downloaded the Physics app

Sensor technology that far outstrips our built in organs is hardly anything new. The problem is we still don't have technology that even begins to approach the human brains ability to actually interpret all this information in a useful manner.

Optics, meta or otherwise are not the limiting factor.