The LAB has a rich 50-year history of successes ranging from the Mars missions to ocean mapping, biological memory storage, and animal TSP (Thought to Speech Program), but these advances, now proven and accepted, were once the source of discomfort and unease.​  Such is the nature of work performed at the LAB.

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Many of the now omnipresent technologies pioneered at polyopticsLABs were once considered impossibilities.  And this progression — first unacheivable, then unimaginable, eventually unavoidable — characterizes many of the LAB’s most important advances.

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We take on new, seemingly impossible challenges each year.   In so doing, there is often a tension between novel concepts and an underdeveloped ethical, legal, and societal framework for addressing the full implications of such research.