Contact Lenses- Computers of the Future

Contact Lenses- Computers of the Future

Bionic lens

The future of computers may well be in contact lenses?! Yes, that picture above that you see is exactly what it seems.  Okay, I’ll explain.

A team from Washington University recently completed trials on a new generation of contact lenses that would project your emails directly onto your eyeballs. Circuits in the lenses are made from layers of metal only a few nanometres thick and feature light-emitting diodes measuring 1/3 of a millimeter across.

The next step is to incorporate hundreds of pixels into the lens. The team believes they can eventually produce complex holographic images and price comparison information just by looking at a specific product. Speculation that we’ll be able to stream web content using contact lenses is also on the table.

There are some major challenges however. One, they have to make the contacts as comfortable as normal ones currently on the market. That pretty much means they have to feel like nothing is in your eye. More challenges include powering these contacts. They are currently without a viable power source and the current prototype only works if it’s within centimeters of a wireless battery. Lastly, there may be uncertain long-term effects of wearing a lens made of electrical circuits that is touching the surface of your eye. Imagine wearing these contacts in the scorching heat?

Very interesting ambitions. I’m still kind of speechless to be quite honest. As a person that wears contact lenses all day, everday, I really haven’t the slightest interest at this point.

A boon for mobile devices 

If successful, the bionic lens could prove a huge boon for mobile-device manufacturers.

“One of the problems is that we can make the electronics smaller and smaller, and then the user wants to interface,” Parviz said. “A really tiny display is not useful.” But putting that display directly onto the user’s contact lenses would effectively solve the problem of size and allow personal electronics to continue shrinking. 

Whether a future iPod will come equipped with a bionic contact remains to be seen — literally — but a lens with a basic display could be ready in the near future.

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Parviz said the health care field also might benefit from the technology. “How do we constantly monitor someone’s health?” he said. “It turns out that a lot of indicators that tell if a person is healthy or not show up on the surface of the eye.”

A biosensor-equipped lens could provide a non-invasive way of gleaning that information and sending it on to a database or serving as a relay station for data or power from retinal implants designed to correct vision problems.  

'Like a normal contact lens' 

If size isn’t necessarily a limitation, adequate power could be. Parviz said his group is now working on the issue of how to run displays or biosensors without the need for awkward batteries. So far, the prototype’s lens-mounted antenna has shown promise in collecting radio frequency waves and turning them into useful energy.

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If all goes well, putting in or taking out the bionic lens should be as easy as popping a regular one in or out, he said. “It should feel like a normal contact lens. It should be completely smooth against the surface of the eye.”

Which isn’t to say the lens is inconspicuous. “If you look into the rabbits’ eyes, you would notice that something is going on,” Parviz said.

Nevertheless, the rabbits tolerated the bionic lenses well during their 20-minute fittings, though none of the systems have yet been switched on. The group has yet to seek permission for the necessary safety trials in humans.

If safety and engineering issues are addressed, future iterations could perhaps be engineered to camouflage the circuitry, thus sparing bionic lens-wearing commuters the stares of passersby swearing they’d just seen the Terminator or a visor-less Geordi La Forge from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”