Say goodbye to your camera bump: researchers discover counterpart to lens

TLDR; get used to using a phone case to hide the camera bump.

Low-light is the primary competitive motivation for mobile phone manufacturers. Most metasurfaces have >25% transmission loss per surface when manufactured.

This is a cool research concept. >20 years away and doubtful it'll go into the mobile phone rear-facing cameras. Maybe the structured light forward facing cameras will use it.

So, to remove the 'camera bump' they'd need to design an F/1.2 lens to be equivalent to current F/1.6 iPhone 1X lenses. That assumes they can achieve comparable MTF with only 2 metasurfaces. If they have to use 3 surfaces, it extends to F/1.0. You can do the math to see how quickly it falls apart using this calculator: https://commonlands.com/pages/dof-calculator .