Insights
More than Meets the Eye
January 23, 2014
- Buzz
- More than Meets the Eye
Intellectual Ventures’ Metamaterials Commercialization Center (MCC) focuses on exploring and accelerating the commercialization of metamaterials technologies. For those of us who forgot to take post-graduate physics, metamaterials are synthetic materials that have properties that would be impossible in nature. Metamaterials can manipulate incoming electro-magnetic radiation, such as light or radio waves, to redirect it in a variety of potentially useful ways.
While Intellectual Ventures has researched exotic applications of metamaterials like cloaking devices that could make an object invisible, our current focus is on more practical applications of the technology in such areas as communications, radar, security, collision avoidance, and medical devices.
Working within the IV Lab and alongside pioneering experts in the field from Duke University and Imperial College, the MCC team conducts application-scoping, proof-of-concept demonstrations, technical-risk-reduction projects, and applied research. Our two venture-backed spin-out companies, Kymeta and Evolv, are perhaps better known results of our metamaterials work, but the MCC team is also behind such research as the recent article in the Microwave Journal, where they argued that advances in metamaterials are accelerating the next generation of increasingly affordable, smart and small antennas.
Over nearly a decade of research, we have also built up the world’s leading portfolio of metamaterials IP, due in no small part to the experts in MCC. But just as exciting is the metamaterials market that is growing up around the world, between academia and the private sector – who knows what we will see (or not, as the case may be) next?
