From October 23 to 25, the on-site final of the Guangdong Division of the China International College Students’ Innovation Competition (2026) was held at South China Agricultural University. Teams from the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) won a total of two gold medals and five silver medals.

The project “Moxwell — The World’s First Metasurface Optical Waveguide Lens, a Revolutionary Force in Full-Color AR Display Technology,” submitted by the team led by Dr. Zhongtao TIAN of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, advanced to the championship round as the top project in its group in the Postgraduate Entrepreneurship Group of the Higher Education Main Track, and ultimately took the provincial runner-up title. 

This marks the first time SUSTech has reached the championship round of the competition — a historic breakthrough for the University. Drawing on the team’s long-standing work in AR display, and conducted under the guidance of Academician Xiaowei SUN of the Institute of Nanoscience and Applications, the project has achieved groundbreaking progress. It offers a systematic solution to the “impossible triangle” that has long constrained the AR optical waveguide industry.

A total of 210 universities took part in this year’s provincial competition, registering 126,800 projects and 474,100 student participants. Only 400 projects advanced to the on-site final, where they were divided into 18 competition groups by track and category. The top-ranked project in each group’s gold-medal contest then advanced to the championship round.

These awards are also a milestone achievement of the University’s continued deepening of its educational philosophy of “Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship” and of its “Four-Creation Integration” talent development system. Taking this provincial breakthrough as an opportunity, the Entrepreneurship College will further open up the pathway from laboratory technology to industrial validation, providing more resilient support for the cultivation of innovative talent and the commercialization of hard-tech achievements in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.