About
Optica Industry Summit on Advanced Optics at Corning
24–25 March 2026 | Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY
Shaping the Future of Advanced Optics
Co-hosted by Optica and Corning Inc., this exclusive two-day summit brings together global leaders in advanced optics at the renowned Corning Museum of Glass. Join industry developers and end users to discuss real requirements, adoption barriers, and emerging opportunities.
Advanced optics is moving from bespoke components to platform manufacturing.
This executive-level summit focuses on the real bottlenecks:
yield, replication, metrology, and design-for-scale.
If your roadmap depends on optical performance at volume, this is the room where alignment happens.
Who Should Attend?
- Senior leaders defining strategy in optics-related businesses.
- R&D managers and engineers in design, manufacturing, and metrology.
- Business development leaders exploring new product opportunities.
- End users in space, consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, and semiconductor industries who want to understand what nano-optics can offer them.
Why Attend?
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This summit brings together developers and end users to discuss real requirements, adoption barriers, and emerging opportunities. Attendees will gain insight into how different industries—from space to consumer electronics and healthcare—plan to integrate novel optical components such as DOEs, metamaterials, micro- and nano-structured surfaces into their legacy. It’s a chance to see if you belong in this transformation, evaluate whether this is your business opportunity, and decide how to jump on this train before it leaves the station.
What problems will the summit help solve for attendees?
- Clarify how traditional methods can be adapted to remain relevant in a nano-driven future.
- Understand which optical technologies are likely to reach mass adoption, and in which markets.
- Learn from end users what functions they need and what prevents adoption today.
- Identify opportunities for cross-sector collaboration, from shared manufacturing methods to converging metrology standards.
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Reduce uncertainty around where to invest by hearing multiple perspectives—from technology developers to application leaders.
- Decide if and how your organization should position itself in the shift from macro to nano.
Key Topics/Sessions
- Novel design concepts: flat optics, meta-optics, DOE, and waveguides
- Manufacturing methods and scalable production approaches
- Metrology and quality control for advanced optics
- Application case studies across industries
Highlight: Panel discussion on “What is needed for mass adoption of advanced optics?”
Why is this important?
Optics is undergoing a fundamental transition: from traditional bulk components shaped by ray optics to wafer-level optics defined by wave principles. High-volume applications such as consumer electronics and XR devices are moving away from legacy products, with compact and lightweight photonic solutions becoming the new standard. These technologies can substitute entire optical systems while enabling scalable, cost-effective manufacturing, and they also open new fields such as 3D sensing, lab-on-a-chip devices, and ultra-fast optical communication. Some established methods will remain, but they must be adapted to serve new design paradigms and manufacturing scales. Understanding how macro-optics and nano-optics can complement each other is essential for anyone shaping the future of optical systems.
