Hybrid Meta‐Optics Enable Large Spatial‐Spectral‐Bandwidth Thermal Imaging for Augmented Reality Application

ABSTRACT Long‐wave infrared (LWIR) imaging, or thermal imaging, is extensively used in security surveillance, night vision, and industrial inspection. Conventional LWIR systems, however, are heavily reliant on complex multi‐lens assemblies to correct for coma, other Seidel aberrations, and chromatic aberrations. While flat meta‐optics offer a promising path to simplify these systems, existing designs operating in the pure LWIR band remain hindered by a fundamental trade‐off between achieving a large field‐of‐view and a broad operational bandwidth—that is, a high spatial‐spectral bandwidth product (SSBP). Here, we introduce an approach utilizing large‐scale hybrid meta‐optics to address these challenges and demonstrate polarization‐insensitive thermal imaging with the highest SSBP. Incorporating a refractive lens and a metasurface corrector, the hybrid metalens doublet achieves a full FOV angle greater than 120° across the 8–12 µm spectral band. A compact LWIR camera weighing 17 g incorporating the hybrid metalens doublet has been developed. It exhibits high‐performance thermal imaging by effectively detecting ambient thermal radiation in various indoor and outdoor environments. We also integrate the hybrid metalens with an augmented reality system, which supports real‐time processing of a range of vision tasks, including distortion correction, object recognition, image segmentation, and display enhancement, with a local computational backend and deep‐learning framework.