Superhuman vision may be on the horizon
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."
A separate device will probably relay information to the lens's control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens. Even so, Parviz argues that these lenses don't need to be terribly complex to be useful:
Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.
In trials, rabbits wore lenses with metal circuitry for 20-minute intervals without adverse effect.
(Credit: University of Washington)Parviz's team still has to overcome several obstacles. For instance, the lens' key components need to be reduced in size and integrated onto about 1.5 square centimeters of polymer. The engineers haven't been able to do this yet, but they have devised a "specialized assembly process" by which they integrate several different components onto a lens.
Another issue is safety. Red LEDs typically are made of toxic aluminum gallium arsenide. To make a lens safe, the toxins must be thoroughly enveloped in a biocompatible substance, which must never bleed.
So far, Parviz writes, "We've fabricated prototype lenses with an LED, a small radio chip, and an antenna, and we've transmitted energy to the lens wirelessly, lighting the LED." They then encapsulated the lenses in a biocompatible polymer and tested them on rabbits with no noticeable adverse effect, although the rabbits only wore the lenses for 20-minute intervals.
Parviz isn't making any promises on when these lenses will be ready, or how they will initially be used, but he hopes that, as with iPhone apps, there will be countless input points from developers and tinkerers around the world.
The eyes may soon be the window to not only someone's soul, but his circuitry, too.
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
Both of these issues will need to be *completely* addressed to make these lenses even slightly useful.
In fact, I think we should all go back to torches and stone tools.
What I want to know is when did Grimace become an Engineer?
kormiko yes glasses are for nerds and hot librarians, but if they came out with glasses that did this everyone nerd and not would buy them...these would make glasses cool.
I wear glasses, actually.
I'm not a librarian, and I'm not smart enough for nerd status.
I've read about these contacts a few weeks ago. However, they are working on glasses that can do this same thing and will probably come out a lot sooner than these contact lenses. Many people won't feel comfortable wearing contact lenses anyway, so there will be an option.
It will go as follows, augmented computer phones (which we have now), then wearable monitor glasses connected to the computer phones in your pocket, then computers embedded into the glasses themselves, then onto contacts, then put directly into our brains. Fun!!! Can't wait.
It would be great, but we can have more than one team of engineers working on different things.
Some teams work better on some projects than others.
There are teams that are improving eyesight now anyway, using stem cells, infra-red treatments, and robotic eyes.
there are 356,000 results. and there are only about 150,000 ophthalmologists in the world. but it is just a little more complicated than creating a contact lens-based "heads up" display.
http://www.physorg.com/news172920565.html
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The benefit in doing that first is that the size constraints aren't nearly as impossible.
-Luis
Look at the specs of an iPhone 3GS (2009) to the specs of an average iMac (1999). The iPhone is smaller, faster with much more RAM, much more disk space, plus it's a portable phone. Price is hard to compare since you have to deal with phone/data plans for the iPhone and phone/internet plans for the iMac back then, plus whatever configuration you choose for both. But that was only a ten years difference and technology advanced really fast. It doesn't seem like it when you're living through it, but it really does move quickly.
The technology advances of the 2010s are going to go faster than it did in this decade and the 2020s will go even faster than the 2010s. I see these contacts could happen within the next ten years, but definitely by the next twenty. To me, the horizon is not that far away.
- by Ancient_Archive September 22, 2009 8:09 PM PDT
- I think that what these guys here are doing is excellent. Yeah they might not be able to make these lenses specifically. But it is the push for advancing technology that might be useful in other gizmos of the future. eg they might develop a new LED which doesn't use aluminium gallium arsenide.
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(20 Comments)The University of Washington have got the right idea.