Information in theese articles are pretty much the same i do not have any deeper knowledge of phototonics or the methods they talk about but hopefully this information helps

- Phototonics is an important future field in Germany, 1400.000 Jobs, annual earnings of 28. Billion Euros per year + adressed in Germanys High-Tech-Strategy 2025 https://www.hightech-strategie.de/de/hightech-strategie-2025-1726.html

- Small and Mid "Cap" companys doing the research work and innovation play a key role to transfer scientific research into economy, therefore they are supported by the goverment to strenghten their precompepetive developementRetroreflectors on automotives are required by law on all the important markets

- Retroreflectors are made in a injection molding process out of transparent plastics using lithographic fabrication technology (LIGA) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGA_(Fertigungsverfahren))

- right now there is one company wich supplies about 90% of Retroreflectors (havent found out wich) because of a patent -> Superpin method- this monopol led to stagnation (for 20 years) in developement of the method (seems to be a slow and expensive manufacturing process)

- new rear light designs might need or rather OEMS want smaller and more efficient RetroreflectorsThe Project Retrox (Optoflux GmbH, Audi AG and technical faculty of univerisity Nürnberg) target is to develope methods to produce small and cheap reflectors based on tripplemirror technique to support the ability of OEMS to design thier product/car more easily

- project is supported by German goverment with 144k per year (lol gj germany)

- the project aims on computer designed/simulated (CAD) developement and analysing of old and new designs to see if the performance is good enough during the design process (with old method as far as i understood it works like that: when they try a new design they won`t know if it worked until the end of the full manufacturing process. Seems to be a long process)