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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."
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.
With respect, I doubt that'll be in the 'near' future for these. The problem with recording video is that you actually have to capture the photons to do that. Capture the photons on the recording media, and they are no longer available for the eye to 'see'. The non-contact versions of 'eye mounted' HUDs that I've seen get around this by using a complex setup to split the image into two, but from what I understand of that, it'd be practically impossible to use the same method for a contact.
I suppose another solution might be 'capture and relay', but that invariably would cause your vision to lag reality. Not something I see even the most ardent transhumanists voting for.
Further, studies show that the eye's point-of-focus jerks all over the place. Your gaze is rarely centered in just one spot in a scene. Then there's the question of (depth-of-field) focus...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Why not just replace the whole eye, or at least the lens part of it?
Almost everyone over 50 has some vision issues, and many people much younger than that. Plus, you could add features like zoom or filters.
That's the future - replacing parts of the body with better synthetic ones.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Contact lenses cover more than the pupil. A recording device located over the iris would not interfere with vision.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Since that single LED is so close to your eyeball, I think it would be hard to see the difference between the blur of single LED and the blur of a high resolution grid of LEDs.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf mutes!
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
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.
Implants are impractical for everyone to have. There's too much of a failure rate in all electronics, and the moment you have a dead pixel, I pity you. If someone doesn't like it, or needs an upgrade, you're screwed. Like the fact that they doubled the resolution since you got it? Too bad, your eye can't handle another surgery. Augmented reality belongs as just that: an augment, as in a set of glasses you can take off. There's no place in the human body for an upgrade slot.
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.