John Fijol

Research & DataAugust 14, 2026

The race to develop commercially successful augmented reality (AR) smart glasses has become one of the most closely watched technology competitions in the world. Nearly every major technology company is investing heavily in displays, optics, artificial intelligence, and user experiences that promise to redefine how people interact with digital information. Most conversations focus on image quality, field of view, brightness, optical performance, and system aesthetics and weight reduction. While those innovations deserve the attention they receive, they overlook what may become the single greatest differentiator in the years ahead: manufacturability.

The companies that will ultimately lead the augmented reality market will not necessarily be those that invent the most advanced optical component. They will be the organizations that can manufacture those components consistently, economically, and at the volumes required for widespread adoption. For the industry, success will ultimately depend on achieving the manufacturing efficiencies necessary to produce advanced optical systems at consumer-scale pricing while supporting production volumes measured in the tens or even hundreds of millions of units. History has repeatedly shown that breakthrough technologies succeed only when they can move beyond the laboratory and into scalable production. Augmented reality is approaching that same inflection point.

Innovation has never been the industry’s weakness. Over the past decade, researchers and engineers have introduced remarkable advances in waveguides, metalenses, diffractive optics, and other optical architectures capable of dramatically reducing the size and weight of imaging systems. The technical progress has been extraordinary, yet the commercial market has grown far more slowly than many anticipated. The challenge now is not to prove that advanced optics can work. The challenge is producing them reliably at commercial scale.

Moving from a successful prototype to millions of identical optical components requires an entirely different set of capabilities than designing a breakthrough technology. Manufacturing introduces challenges involving yield, repeatability, process control, inspection, material consistency, and cost. A component that performs beautifully in a research environment can quickly become impractical if it cannot be produced with consistent quality at the volumes expected by consumer electronics manufacturers.

These realities are becoming increasingly important as the industry prepares for broader commercialization. Consumers will ultimately judge smart glasses by comfort, reliability, battery life, weight, and affordability just as much as image quality. Those expectations place enormous pressure on manufacturers to deliver precision optical components with extremely tight tolerances while maintaining production efficiencies that support competitive pricing. OEMs are now highlighting the cost of the display modules, not performance limitations, as a key barrier for mass adoption of AR glasses. Further, a benchmark of <$100 for each display module (one for each eye) has been set as a necessity to enable sales volumes to grow to +100 million units. To date this has been unachievable without sacrificing performance and reliability.

The semiconductor industry offers an important lesson. Decades ago, transistor innovation captured most of the headlines, but manufacturing excellence ultimately determined which companies could lead the market. Semiconductor fabrication became one of the world’s most sophisticated manufacturing disciplines because consistent production proved just as valuable as breakthrough design. The optical industry is beginning to experience a similar transition.

At Myrias Optics, we see this shift reflected in nearly every conversation with customers and industry partners. Performance remains essential, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. Manufacturers must also consider whether a technology can deliver new functionality with high yields, repeatable quality, predictable production costs, and long-term reliability. Those factors often determine whether an innovation remains an impressive demonstration or becomes a commercially successful product.

To address these issues, we need to rethink how optics are designed and manufactured. Conventional optics manufacturing has been based on shaping glass lenses for centuries. In recent decades glass forming is increasingly replaced with molding of polymer lenses, but still requires physical shaping of thick bulky lenses and is limited to applications where reliability concerns about polymers are tolerable.

At Myrias, we are pioneering the manufacture of nanoimprinted wafer level optics, where thousands of optical components can be fabricated in one simple step on a single wafer. We utilize nanoimprint technology, which replaces the antiquated manufacturing processes with a simple, highly scalable replication process. These ‘metaoptics’ are based on the physics of diffraction, not refraction like conventional optics, allowing us to improve system functionality, while minimizing system complexity.

Discussions are not limited to optical performance or manufacturability alone. Reliability is equally important. This is why Myrias has developed proprietary all-inorganic nanoimprint materials. There are no polymers in any of our optics ensuring the highest quality and reliability. These developments enable the production of advanced optical components with greater consistency than was possible only a few years ago and bridge the gap between research and commercialization.

The importance of manufacturing extends well beyond augmented reality. Many of the same optical platforms being developed for smart glasses are finding opportunities in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, aerospace, defense, semiconductor equipment, medical devices, and advanced sensing. As these industries continue to converge, companies capable of manufacturing high performance optical components at scale will be positioned to serve multiple high growth markets rather than a single application.

This broader perspective is changing how successful technology companies approach product development. Manufacturing considerations can no longer be treated as challenges to solve after engineering is complete. Instead, new approaches to manufacturability and in many cases new material systems must become part of the design process from the very beginning. The organizations that integrate engineering and manufacturing early will reduce commercialization risk, accelerate customer adoption, and establish stronger competitive positions as demand increases.

The next decade will undoubtedly produce impressive advances in displays, optical architectures, and user experiences. Those innovations will continue pushing augmented reality closer to mainstream adoption. Yet the companies that define the future of the industry may ultimately be remembered less for inventing new optical technologies than for making those technologies practical, repeatable, and commercially viable.

As augmented reality moves from research laboratories into global manufacturing facilities, the industry’s defining question is no longer simply who can design the most advanced optics. The more important question is who can manufacture them at the quality, consistency, and scale that transforms promising innovation into products used by millions of people. That is where the next chapter of the augmented reality industry will be written, and it is where the true competitive advantage is beginning to emerge.

Written by John Fijol.
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John Fijol

John Fijol, CEO of Myrias Optics, based in Amherst, Massachusetts. Myrias Optics manufactures optical components. The Company develops metaoptics, nanopatterned structures on glass, as well as provides desired performance specifications, initial scale-up demonstration, formulation, device design, and processing development services. Myrias Optics serves customers in the United States.