I suspect "nanoscale structures" means that it's going to be highly sensitive to the wavelength of light, I'm interested in seeing what kind of chromatic aberration is going to come out from this.
Also in the video you can see spatial ringing, which is highly indicative of coherent light (single wavelength, like in a laser.)
This is still a cool discovery and could definitely have a lot of important applications, but it's important to clarify what this is, and what it isn't.
> 3D artistic illustration of the wide-field-of-view metalens capturing a 180° panorama of MIT’s Killian Court and producing a high-resolution monochromatic flat image.
My guess is that it is only good for monochromatic light.
Does anyone know how much of a limitation that'd be in practice though? CCDs are monochromatic too, which we deal with using either Bayer filters (usually RGGB IIRC) or (in fancier high end stuff) a splitter prism leading to 3 separate CCDs. Modern computational photography is also increasingly able to do sensor fusion, even between different cameras. I can see how making use of this would still be an extra challenge in a small form factor, because normally the split/filter happens after the lens which simplifies things a lot. Having to do 3x multisensor fusion with meta material fisheye only definitely would be more effort and bulkier. Seems like it might still be pretty useful though depending on final cost? Otherwise maybe it'll end up niche, but it's really cool research anyway.