The fully integrated manufacturer and supplier of visible and infrared optical components and subsystems, LightPath Technologies, has added freeform optics to its portfolio of high-performance, next-generation custom-molded optical solutions.

Freeforms are optical shapes or optical surfaces that are designed with little to no symmetry. The feature provides improved aperture, field of view and miniaturization, but makes the manufacturing process extremely challenging.

Using its proprietary molding technology, the company can now mass-produce molded freeform optics instead of the conventional practice of fabricating optical elements individually. Numerous high-performance optical applications will benefit from the high precision optical elements with freeform surfaces by enabling the usage of complex surface profiles that allow beam shaping.

Freeform optics are vital from the perspective of augmented and virtual reality applications, infrared and military optical systems, and 3D imaging and visualization. Since these systems require high-performance packed within a compact form factor, freeform optics present a suitable solution with enhanced flexibility, size, weight, and power optimization.

“We are pleased to introduce freeform optics to our customers worldwide,” said Rob Myers, a Product Manager at LightPath.

“We believe freeform optics will play a major role in many emerging application areas, including the miniaturization of future AR/VR glasses. Developing our molded freeform optics technology required making advances in several key areas, such as mold fabrication, compression molding of non-rotationally symmetric optics, and metrology to test the new lenses using computer-generated holograms (CGH). With one of the world’s largest and most accomplished teams of engineers under one roof, we are very excited to be able to uniquely address some very exciting market opportunities with our new optical solutions.”

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