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Augmented Reality In a Contact Lens
Toe, The writes "Bionanotechnology researcher Babak A Parviz writes about his research toward producing a computer interface in a contact lens. At the moment, they have only embedded a single LED, but they foresee a much more complex interface such as detailed in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Such lenses potentially could also read human bio-information from the eye, providing medical information on the order of what is now taken from blood tests, but on a continuous basis. An example would be monitoring glucose levels for diabetics. The author states that, 'All the basic technologies needed to build functional contact lenses are in place,' and details what refinements and advances will be necessary to bring this technology to reality."
Resistance is futile.
This is way better than having to hold your iPhone in front of you all the time...
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Here's an illustration that explains it all in a glance.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Now, throw in a TrackIR-like system, and we can 100% totally immerse ourselves inside a virtual reality PC. No more monitors that have limited field of views etc. Also, imagine the military and civilian aspects - how a terminator can overlay regional information like that of the new iPhone app - but now it's in your eyes.
But they're gonna have to figure out a) how to power it and b) how to transmit the data to these devices. That is true tech challenge.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Can I just get a contact lens with cross-hairs in it?
Why yes. I do play Quake III Arena often. Why do you ask?
I'd be happy just to have a usable interface in a pair of normal glasses (non-correcting).
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Another inevitable function of this contact lens is recording video. Everything you see passes through this lens, so you will be able to record everything you see (except, of course, for dreams and hallucinations).
It would be like Tivo for your life.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
My eyes get tired now from looking intently at a screen for hours each day, imagine the new ailments that can arise from such an invention! This reminds me of a Mad Magazine parody of the Six Million Dollar Man, where his targeting crosshairs blocked what he was looking at, begging the question - how do you turn it off? On the upside, you could browse the internet, send messages, play games and watch movies in perfect privacy. It could allow more taboo segments of the entertainment industry a legitimate platform. Videodrome anyone?
Why worry about getting a lot of graphics onto a small surface. Let's focus on the optical version of a cochlear implant. Just graft into the existing data stream and overlay extra information. We will need this technology anyway to help the blind, might as well get it developed and over with.
So how long until those contact lenses can send twitter updates?
Blinks. Leech kinetic energy from the eyelid. Teeny-tiny stick-on magnets go on the outside of your eyelid; they'll be the next fashion statement. Every time you blink, it induces a current pulse in the lens pickup coils.
For that matter, it might be possible to collect energy from saccades and other natural eye movements. That's potentially a higher-res and lower-latency method for eye-tracking than cameras, which you'll need for AR, and if you can harvest energy to boot, so much the better!
I don't have the physics/EE chops to run the numbers, but I'll bet you'd get more power this way than from a "solar cell module". (Who wants to keep their eyes wide open and directed toward a bright light source?)
They used this technology only a couple of months ago in Torchwood : Children of Earth
Summation 2
Be cool to be able to have these things do an overlay of reality like in K W Jeter's Noir so that we can live in an old black and white detective movie.
Of course once you can get an overlay for your reality things will get interesting. Swimsuit edition overlay: We can all let ourselves go and we'll still look great to people who have the contacts.
The girl (or boy) with kaleidoscope eyes.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Divert 10% of the incoming light to a recorder, and the wearer will never notice. Put the sensors on the outside face of some of the opaque lens components. Or put them around the periphery. There's no way you're going to do AR without a way to detect and analyze the "R" that you're "A"ing, anyhow.
At the moment, they have only embedded a single LED
I will be more impressed when they get a single fluorescent bulb in there...
I just want an added twinkle to my eye... maybe something for my teeth as well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Torchwood, among others have already postulated this technology. Get on with it.
Why bother
There were some glasses that had a display in them that showed a pretty interesting concept: augmented reality baseball.
You could extend on this.
How about Paintball? Now its all virtual, no wasting paintballs, all the same mechanics.
Or lasertag, or real guns emulated in AR.
AR basketball, no need for ball or goal, just AR glasses and maybe a set of gloves with feedback so you can feel where the ball is.
The glasses will have audio feedback as well.
As long as you are synced up to each other, a computer can process the AR world.
You could even place a small computer on everyone so there won't be any problems with distance. (in-game long distance sniping might not work in this case, but nobody likes snipers!)
Distance is really the only problem in this. I guess you could always have a transmitter placed in the center of the gaming area.
A visible end to where the transmission falls off will show on the display in some form.
as far as i know current contact lens arent working for everybody, since some need some really heavy duty glassware, but with this you have lens that can alter the image to any degree, making them usable by anyone, it's really got some real world potential not childish applications like most above ...
Why go for an augmented reality when you can have a demented reality?
This guy's the limit!
If you put your eye really close to a lcd screen, you'll see the image blurry, how are they gonna fix this, without limiting the vision beyond the contact lens?
...
Stories like this remind me of Fred and Barney looking at the Grand Canyon, and it's just a tiny stream. Fred comments, "They say it'll be a big ditch some day." Yes, it's Cynical Day here at the Desperation Compound.
They've put a single LED in a contact lens, so now we have Augmented Reality.
Let me know when I can get replacement lenses (IOL) with all this and more in it.
IOL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraocular_lens
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvmENasDFMw
Bah!
Hmm... Inertial Damper... *draws a huge arrow on his motorcycle schematic pointing to the front forks*
Heinsenberg compensator = Registered ECC setup for RAM.
Zero-point module: processor with no floating point instructions.
SIG: HUP
Try putting a picture 1cm in front of your eye.
You cannot focus this close, so how are you gonna focus on an image sitting on your eyeball?
I really can't wait for the first hacker who manages to hack someone else's lens to output an extremely bright light to the wearer...
so that he has to remove those lens, because the natural reflex of closing the eye is totally useless!
When you're arrested by the cops: "my lenses were hacked! i really didn't see that stop sign!"
Or: "cause of death: blinded by his lenses while driving"
Such an interesting future is coming towards us!
RF also being 'shooting radio waves directly into your eyeball'.
The eyes are more sensitive to radiation than any part of the body. The prospect of this power source causing cataracts and other eye damage is higher than in other body parts -- even non-ionizing radiation can harm the delicate lens, which has no thermal control. There are also possible problems caused by element heating.
I'm skeptical that this technology will ever pan out. At least, not until we redesign and replace the eye.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I keep seeing people go on and on about Torchwood doing this, but this has always been a part of Ghost in the Shell, hopefully reality doesn't end up like GiTS because the "cyberbrains" make Win 95 seem secure.
Forget a contact on my eye - replace the whole eyeball. Give me low light, infrared, light reduction, bloom compensation, microscope and telescope functions, facial recognition, recording, playback, computer display link, etc.
Pretty much everyone needs glasses by 40 anyway, why not just get new eyes when you're 18?
I know we're a long way off from being able to plug a camera directly into the optic nerve, but when that day comes I'm up for it.
If you have a image which is stabilized on the retina (appears in the same part of the retina) for an extended period of time will disappear from view. This is why we don't see the blood vessels in our eyes occluding our view of the world. If they produce a static image on the contact, it will very quickly fade from view. In order for this to be useful, they will have to track the movements that the eye makes dozens of times per second, calculate where the image should appear on the retina based on a projection of where it wants to be seen in real space, and switch the leds to the new image. Good luck making this performant enough to keep up with the eyes. There's a good chance the the leds that they are using won't even be able to switch fast enough to maintain the illusion.
Really surprised no one has mentioned Dennou Coil.
This would be awesome, but I'd rather have glasses then contact lenses. Probably easier from an engineering standpoint as well.
Why go for an augmented reality when you can have a demented reality?
Exactly what I have always thought! Virtual reality tech would be best employed helping me to function in "the real world", while eliminating much of the harsh unpleasantness and petty annoyances entailed by said reality. It might be tempting, for example, to have my VR contacts and earplugs filter out people I don't like (e.g. the PHB), but such an "ignore list" could lead to collision problems, not to mention losing my job. However, it would definitely be more fun if I could see the PHB as Donald Duck or Darth Vader.
Another problem that could be solved by VR is my inability to remember people's names (which will become much worse when everyone looks like gnomes, orcs, Star Trek characters, or speaking blobs of goo). The solution is obvious—the computer linked to my VR lenses would know who is near me, and cause their names to float above their heads, just like in a present-day MMPORG.
And of course I'd work like mad to hack into the VR network, so my boss would see me industriously at work while I'm lying on some Cancun beach. Verily, my enthusiasm waxes enormously as I consider the vista of incredibly life-enhancing possibilities inherent in this technology.
I'm sure I don't need to mention to this predominantly male, sex-starved audience how I would like to see women. And with my hacking abilities, I could control just how I look to them. Clearly, the world's geeks must pursue this avenue of research as their top priority!
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
... goatse.cx to a whole new level.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
I deeply fear an Elmo belief circle.
Oddly enough, I just wrote a fairly lengthy review of Rainbows End over on TeleRead.org. Submitted it to Slashdot; it's still pending. (I'm not optimistic, but it was worth a try.) I talk some about the book, and about how Vernor Vinge's ideas for "the book of the future" have been evolving and changing since True Names.
It'll be fascinating if this technology actually starts to show up in real life.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I'm pretty sure if they come out with these, the whole DBZ meme will come back with a vengeance.
Me:Hey Steve, what's your contacts say about his power level? .
Steve: IT'S OVER 9000!
Me: What? 9000?
Anything on the surface of an eye is not in focus and so does not produce an image to the retina, so it will be tricky to try to form any sharp images with such device.
I love the idea, but having conducted many eye-tracking sessions I think that there are a number of basic challenges that the contact-lens implementation would need to overcome. First, contacts drift all over the cornea. It's really quite disconcerting to watch, especially when you've got obvious markers like vanity-coloring for irises. Station-keeping over the pupil would require technology that's not mentioned here. Alternatively, you might monitor the portion of the contact that's positioned over the pupil at any given moment using photocells on the underside to catch light reflected off the retina, but then you'll need a bigger display and use up valuable real estate. Second, similarly and perhaps even more importantly, orientation maintenance. If there was a good way for contact orientation to be maintained, bifocal contact lenses would be a reality already. Instead you encounter bizarre stopgaps like a reading lens in one eye and a distance lens in the other. Third, eyes are a fairly disgusting environment. Crud on regular contacts doesn't seem to impede vision, but the delicate electronics in a device like this might object to working in a wet, salty, bacteria-ridden setting unless very carefully insulated. Nothing bad about reaching for the dream, but I'll take a pair of prescription Virtual Light-style glasses while we're waiting.
How about first creating contact lens that actually allow me to see and do not hurt or destroy my corneas?
(I have Keratoconus)
1 LED embedded in a contact lens. VGA resolution is now only 5 orders of magnitude away. Better start coding those augmented reality apps!
It's here, baby!
Looks like an android failing a Turing test.
I wonder if it had these contact lenses for eyes...
That only shows your iris to have a cross hair.
It does not display a cross hair imposed over your vision.
I wonder if you could get a set with grids printed on them, as it could be a useful aid when doing observational drawing.
One problem with this is that contact lenses float on your eye and are not stationary. This is a serious problem, because to keep a constant orientation, you'll either need to constantly rotate any light emitters to stay in the same place (probably not possible), or weight the contact lens as is currently done with astigmatic lenses (not a great solution).
Apart from this, contact lenses tear, break, get lost, etc... At the moment, my soft lenses cost $5 apiece. If one tears, gets lost, or something else equally destructive, it's not a problem. If the same lens cost $1000, that would be a much bigger problem. And I'm not sure there's a good solution to this. If you make the lenses soft, they'll degrade quickly (as current soft lenses do). If you make them hard, then they will fall, get scratched, and the like over the long term.
What has been seen cannot be unseen, but I can at least flush the cache!
My first guess was 2074; looks like these lenses will happen much sooner.
http://www.davidjarvis.ca/dave/essays/daycorder.shtml
Although putting a single LED into a contact lens is already an achievement, it's not the hard part. As the article points out: power and focusing are major problems, with no plausible solution in sight.
The people to whom the accolades should go are those who finally manage to put it all together, not the people who put together a tiny bit of the technology.
The idea itself, of course, is nearly as old as contact lenses and has appeared in many science fiction stories.
The concept of VR contact lenses was also used in the 1992 book, The California Voodoo Game, a sequel to Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steve Barnes, long before Rainbows End.
A bit off-topic, but has science fiction dealt with such things as augmented reality in the eye? It just occurred to me that it could be interesting to explore the possibilities of people living in an augmented world where the most important stuff cannot be seen (like other people who might not be present and just "augmented", like holograms).
Although that would probably turn into just another dystopia future thingie, cause when you think about it, what are you going to do with a new tech as the basis of a story besides making shit go wrong?
You just got troll'd!
The cornea is a lens and the object has to be at the focal point in order to produce a crisp image. Sorry, guys. Old fashioned optics. Any object on the surface of the cornea will produce a blurry image.
I'm not even worried about the contact lens floating - how are you going to cable this? It needs power, and unless someone simultaneously invents a saline based generator you'll need to connect it somewhere.
I'll be really impressed if they solve that, so far it's not even interesting..
Insert
Clatter, anyone?
An example would be monitoring glucose levels for diabetics.
DO WANT
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