Photochromic lenses that allow you to walk from inside to outside without putting on UV-filtering lenses have been around for decades. But the technology is just making its way to contacts.
The contact lens on the left contains photochromic dyes that darken in the presence of UV light.
(Credit: Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology)Traditionally, these light-to-dark lenses have been constructed by coating a normal lens with a photochromic dye. When UV light hits the dye, the individual molecules expand, darkening the lens and absorbing light. Coating contacts, however, doesn't work so well.
So researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have laced contacts with a matrix on nano tunnels filled with these photochromic dyes. Not only has the team been successful in producing transition contacts; these contacts darken in the presence of UV light faster than standard lenses (just 10 to 20 seconds).
The researchers are now working on isolating the photochromic material to just the corneal region of your eye, granting you all of the UV filtering without turning your entire iris black.
But until they graft the timeless style of a Wayfarer onto my eyeball, I'll pass.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.
Engineers are developing contact lenses with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
(Credit: University of Washington)Contact lenses have traditionally been engineered to help the visually impaired see the world around them more clearly--to attain perfect, or close to perfect, vision.
But why not super vision? Why not a lens that could superimpose holographic driving control panels over a pilot's otherwise normal view? Enable Web surfing on the go? Provide a virtual world for gamers that covers their entire field of vision instead of just a plasma screen?
Engineers at the University of Washington have been asking just that as they manufacture first-gen versions of the bionic eye in the form of contact lenses with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
"Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision," writes Babak A. Parviz, an associate professor at UW who heads a multi-disciplinary group on electronics in contact lenses, in the September 2009 issue of IEEE's Spectrum. "To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs."
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