Contact lenses aren’t just for correcting your crummy vision anymore.
Scientists at the University of Washington have created a contact lens containing a single, built-in LED that functions as a wearable electronic display. The lens was tested on rabbits, which showed no negative effects.
The research, published yesterday in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, could portend a future where people are able to wear special contact lenses that induce augmented reality. In augmented reality, people use built-in electronic displays to overlay virtual visual information on top of everyday life. This creates what amounts to a real-life, heads-up display, a common feature in first-person shooter video games that’s used to convey information like remaining health and ammunition.
In an interview with The Daily earlier this year, Michio Kaku, a physicist and author of bestselling book “Physics of the Future,” explained just how such contact lenses could be used to, say, re-create scenes of ancient Rome on the site of the modern-day city, or automatically translate foreign languages.
“Today, we can communicate with the Internet via our computers and cellphones,” Kaku writes in the book. “But in the future, the Internet will be everywhere — in wall screens, furniture, on billboards, and even in our glasses and contact lenses. When we blink, we will go online.”
Kaku says that such lenses could become widely available within the next 20 years, and could have profound changes on things like the way children take tests — how do you trust students to be honest when they’ve got the Internet embedded into their contact lenses? — to the way diabetics monitor their blood glucose levels.
The possibilities are exciting, to be sure, but science isn’t quite there yet.
“We have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radio frequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit,” says the report. “This verifies that antennas, radio chips, control circuitry and micrometer-scale light sources can be integrated into a contact lens and operated on live eyes.”
The report continues: “Although our display has only a single controllable pixel, we have provided the first proof-of-concept technology demonstrations for producing multipixel and in-focus images ... that can be integrated into a contact lens.”
The report was written by an 11-member team and headed by the University of Washington’s Babak Parviz, whose earlier work into such contact lenses Kaku references in the book. As the report notes, creating such a contact lens requires overcoming several different obstacles, not least of which includes figuring out how to power the embedded LED in the first place.
The scientists managed to power the lens by broadcasting radio frequency radiation to a tiny antenna embedded around the edge of the lens. For this experiment, scientists were able to broadcast a maximum of 316 milliwatts of power from up to 10 centimeters away from the lens. But certain variables changed things. Applying saline solution to the rabbit’s eye to simulate how some people wear contact lenses, for instance, greatly diminished the effectiveness of the radio frequency to power the lens.
All the tests, which lasted 40 minutes, were successful, proving that the idea of embedding displays into contact lenses is at least viable in the confines of a university laboratory. Moving beyond that, however, will take some doing.
“Significant improvements are necessary to produce fully functional, remotely powered, high-resolution displays,” notes the report. “We are working to improve matching losses, to ensure that power received by the contact lens is maximized at the frequency of best antenna-to-chip matching, and to optimize LED efficiency and duty cycling to reduce power consumption of individual pixels.”
Scientists at the University of Washington have created a contact lens containing a single, built-in LED that functions as a wearable electronic display. The lens was tested on rabbits, which showed no negative effects.
The research, published yesterday in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, could portend a future where people are able to wear special contact lenses that induce augmented reality. In augmented reality, people use built-in electronic displays to overlay virtual visual information on top of everyday life. This creates what amounts to a real-life, heads-up display, a common feature in first-person shooter video games that’s used to convey information like remaining health and ammunition.
In an interview with The Daily earlier this year, Michio Kaku, a physicist and author of bestselling book “Physics of the Future,” explained just how such contact lenses could be used to, say, re-create scenes of ancient Rome on the site of the modern-day city, or automatically translate foreign languages.
“Today, we can communicate with the Internet via our computers and cellphones,” Kaku writes in the book. “But in the future, the Internet will be everywhere — in wall screens, furniture, on billboards, and even in our glasses and contact lenses. When we blink, we will go online.”
Kaku says that such lenses could become widely available within the next 20 years, and could have profound changes on things like the way children take tests — how do you trust students to be honest when they’ve got the Internet embedded into their contact lenses? — to the way diabetics monitor their blood glucose levels.
The possibilities are exciting, to be sure, but science isn’t quite there yet.
“We have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radio frequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit,” says the report. “This verifies that antennas, radio chips, control circuitry and micrometer-scale light sources can be integrated into a contact lens and operated on live eyes.”
The report continues: “Although our display has only a single controllable pixel, we have provided the first proof-of-concept technology demonstrations for producing multipixel and in-focus images ... that can be integrated into a contact lens.”
The report was written by an 11-member team and headed by the University of Washington’s Babak Parviz, whose earlier work into such contact lenses Kaku references in the book. As the report notes, creating such a contact lens requires overcoming several different obstacles, not least of which includes figuring out how to power the embedded LED in the first place.
The scientists managed to power the lens by broadcasting radio frequency radiation to a tiny antenna embedded around the edge of the lens. For this experiment, scientists were able to broadcast a maximum of 316 milliwatts of power from up to 10 centimeters away from the lens. But certain variables changed things. Applying saline solution to the rabbit’s eye to simulate how some people wear contact lenses, for instance, greatly diminished the effectiveness of the radio frequency to power the lens.
All the tests, which lasted 40 minutes, were successful, proving that the idea of embedding displays into contact lenses is at least viable in the confines of a university laboratory. Moving beyond that, however, will take some doing.
“Significant improvements are necessary to produce fully functional, remotely powered, high-resolution displays,” notes the report. “We are working to improve matching losses, to ensure that power received by the contact lens is maximized at the frequency of best antenna-to-chip matching, and to optimize LED efficiency and duty cycling to reduce power consumption of individual pixels.”
