Ultracompact Wide-FOV near-infrared camera with a wafer-level manufactured meta-aspheric lens

Overcoming the trade-off between a wide field of view (FOV) and compactness remains a central challenge for integrating near-infrared (NIR) imaging into smartphones and AR glasses.Existing refractive NIR optics cannot simultaneously support ultrawide angles above 100° and ultrathin total track lengths (TTL) below 5 mm, fundamentally limiting their integration into portable devices.Herein, we present a wafer-level-manufactured meta-aspheric lens (MAL) that simultaneously achieves a 101.5°FOV, 3.39 mm TTL, and F/1.64 aperture within a compact volume of 0.02 cm³.Unlike previous hybrid systems that rely on separate refractive and diffractive components, the proposed MAL introduces a fully integrated architecture that provides a compact form factor.This integration also simplifies fabrication by enabling high-throughput production via micrometre-level precision alignment and bonding on a single wafer, which requires only one dicing step and no additional mechanical fixtures.Furthermore, the design process incorporates manufacturability and enables metalens dispersion modelling, ensuring that the experimental performance matches simulation results.We validated the MAL method using both direct and computational imaging experiments.Despite its small form factor, our scalable MAL demonstrated strong NIR imaging performance in eye tracking, blood vessel imaging, and computational pixel super-resolution tasks.This scalable MAL technology establishes a new benchmark for high-performance miniaturised NIR imaging, and opens the door for nextgeneration smartphones and AR optical systems.