Contact lenses and virtual graphics

In the near future, contact lenses will become a new type of display. The prototype, which will be presented at the BioCas 2009 conference in Beijing in late November, is a device that allows you to display information from mobile devices.

Realizing that the size of the display, increasingly becoming a deterrent in mobile devices, Babak Parviz (Babak Parviz) from the University of Washington in Seattle, came up with the idea of ​​projecting the image into the eye using contact lenses. This idea came to him also because Babak has poor eyesight and he uses contact lenses.

One of the major drawbacks of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. Contact lenses being developed can have a much wider field of view. “We hope to create an image that will be effectively located in front of our eyes, and create a sense of distance from the user 50-100 centimeters,” says Parviz.
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Parviz research involves the use of nano and micro devices in substrates like paper and plastic.

Fitting circuits to contact lenses is challenging. The polymers cannot withstand temperatures and chemicals used in scalable microtechnologies, “Components such as power and a micro-light-emitting diode must be made separately, then enclosed in biologically compatible materials, and then placed in myco-incisions on the lenses themselves.

The same obvious problem is the power supply of such a device. The circuit consumes 330 microwatts, and should work without batteries. Instead, it was proposed to use a ring antenna that uses the energy of a nearby radio source. The Parviz team has already tested on a rabbit.

Future trial versions of the lenses will be powered by the user's mobile phone, as well as receiving information on the lens. They will have a large number of pixels and an array of microlenses for focusing images.

Examples of the use of such lenses from the point of view of the inventors are: reading the subtitles translated by the translator, GPS pointer, and image capturing. Lenses can also be used as head displays by pilots and gamers.

via newscientist.com