Piano-playing robot, cutting-edge lenses among Singapore innovations at CES 2025

The cameras in today's smartphones and pointand-shoot cameras use stacks of plastic or glass lenses to focus light, but these may soon be replaced by a single flat lens, making devices thinner and smaller.

- Lim Yan Liang

Such optics, called metalenses, use existing semiconductor fabrication processes to carve tiny pillars 1/800th the width of a human hair strand onto glass wafers. A resulting 1.5mm lens can have around six million such pillars, which work together to focus light and capture images.

This cutting-edge tech was created by MetaOptics Technologies, one of 11 Singapore companies showcasing their innovations at the Singapore Pavilion of CES 2025 in Las Vegas.

They were among about 1,400 start-ups from around the world vying for investment, partnerships and media attention at the global tech event, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, with most of them packed in an exhibition hall the size of five football fields.

The Straits Times highlights the technology from Singapore showcased at CES, which ran from Jan 7 to 10.

TINY PROJECTOR SHOWS METALENSES' POTENTIAL

Smaller than a pack of cards and needing no external power source, MetaOptics Technologies' US$500 (S$680) pico projector can connect directly to a phone or PC with a USB-C cable and deliver 720p videos at 60 frames per second.

Other products the start-up showcased that use metalenses were a wide-angle facial recognition camera, a contactless fingerprint reader and the world's first single-layered metalens colour camera.