It is a scene many of us are familiar with: You're working on your laptop at the local coffee shop with maybe a half dozen other laptop users – each of you is trying to load websites or stream high-definition videos, and all are craving more bandwidth. Now imagine that each of you had a dedicated wireless channel for communication that was hundreds of times faster than the Wi-Fi we use today, with hundreds of times more bandwidth. That dream may not be far off thanks to the development of metasurfaces – tiny engineered sheets that can reflect and otherwise direct light in desired ways.
