For over a decade, poLight has been working to develop lens technology that replicates the function of the human eye. Now the company is finally ready to introduce “TLens” to the international market.

The advantage of TLens is that the product is able to focus better and faster than current technology. It therefore has enormous market potential, especially bearing in mind that camera quality is becoming increasingly important and accessible to people via smartphones. Researching and developing the product which is now being released into the market has taken considerable time.

STARTED WITH A GEL LUMP

It all started with a small drop of polymer, which the company initially intended to use in connection with fibre infrastructure and laser displays. Polymer has good optical properties. When looking to improve the polymer in collaboration with Sintef, the company had a real Eureka-moment.

“Some bright spark got the idea that using this polymer would be fantastic to mimic the lens in the human eye. We just needed to figure out how to copy the four eye muscles that humans have to shape the polymer. We have spent many years figuring that out and developing it,” says Øyvind Isaksen, poLight CEO.

UNIQUE AUTOFOCUS

The product is called TLens and is short for tuneable lens. The human eye's ability to focus on both near and distant objects, using our eye muscles, is at the core of poLight's product.

“To achieve this function, we need to shape the polymer. We solved this by placing a membrane consisting of glass and a piezo material on the outside. When we apply voltage to the piezo material, the glass membrane bends, thereby shaping the polymer underneath so that the focus changes,” Isaksen explains.

“Horten had the right people when we were looking to set poLight up. The choice fell on Horten because here it was relatively easy to get hold of the highly skilled people within the various engineering disciplines that the company needed. That choice has proven to be right. Even though we have had to supplement our expertise with other companies around the world and have established offices in Finland, China, Taiwan and France, the head office will remain in Horten. Because this is where it all started, and this is where the foundation of the company lies,” says Isaksen.

There are exciting times ahead In the coming years. Isaksen believes that opportunities will arise in many application areas such as barcode readers, robots for production, medical equipment, smart glasses (so-called augmented reality), video-conferencing equipment and many other things that have not yet been seen or understood. The main focus now, however, is to land deals to get the product into smartphones; this could quickly become very big.

“It's a demanding market, so we have to be clever and commercially smart to make it happen. What’s clear, though, is that if we succeed with our strategy, we will become one of the biggest Norwegian IT adventures to date.”