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Where Are Your Contact Lens Displays?
destinyland writes "'We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today,' argues researcher Babak Parvis, 'with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions.' He provides an update on the contact lens with transparent circuitry that's being developed at the University of Washington. (Its components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs which form images in front of the eye such as charts and photographs). They've already developed a lens-with-LED prototype that's powered by 330 microwatts of wireless radio-frequency power, and believe the lenses could also be used as biosensors to deliver body chemistry readings (including blood sugar levels). But 'What we've done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology,' says Dr. Parviz."
Where Are Your Contact Lens Displays?
Oh, that's right, I left them out in the garage in my flying car. You see, I was running Duke Nukem Forever in Hurd but the battery ran out of power so I set them aside to bring in and recharge at my tabletop cold fusion station. It's okay though, I'll have forever to enjoy them now that Ray Kurzweil's Singularity has happened.
My work here is dung.
I got rid of my contacts back in 2006 (I'm a cyborg). For nearsightedness they're far better than glasses because you need to see all day long, but for a display they're not the right platform. Put those transparent circutis in a pair of glasses; I can keep them in my pocket for when they're needed.
You don't see anyone wearing contact sunglasses, now do you? Not even the ones that darken in sunlight and lighten indoors. Contact lens computer displays is a dumb idea.
Free Martian Whores!
I don't know...I seem to have misplaced them. Shit, I'm blind without my visual overlay.
Let us make some Laser emitting diodes and put them behind the eyelids so that they cant even avoid it by closing their eye lids. Wow! You are en evil genius Dr Parviz.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I guess you're fucked if it falls out.
If I displayed a fullscreen hi-res photo of someone's eye on such a lens, would it pass retina scan?
My wife and kids can insert their contacts in minutes. I could never get the hang of it -- it always took me half an hour to put them in and I finally just gave up.
Highly unlikely that I'd ever use such things. A HUD in my glasses though, that'd be cool.
It strikes me that the real trick isn't putting a display on the lens of the eye, but getting a focussed image. I mean, you could write a crisp, clear letter on someone's eyeball right now, but they wouldn't be able to see it. It'd just be a smudge on their vision. That still leaves you open to using a flash of colour in different directions to attract the wearer's attention to hazards, or other blurry ways of presenting information, mind you. I think the real key will be putting MEMS-directed lasers in there which can draw on the retina, bypassing focussing entirely.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
maybe here:
Augmented Reality In a Contact Lens
Bionic Contact Lens May Lead to Overlay Displays
Contact Lenses for Computer Professionals?
Bionic Contact Lens May Lead to Overlay Displays
Smart Contact Lenses
Permormance-Enhancing Contact Lenses
And for the recursive obssesed folks, there's:
Where Are Your Contact Lens Displays?
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
Wake me up when any of these concepts move to market (and at a price point I can afford).
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Is there a study or research done on the health aspects? I would imagine putting powered circuitry into your eyes is a recipe for disaster. Something that is deemed as safe as todays contact lenses would be the only thing I would ever even want to try.
Also... optically speaking would you be able to read text that is effectively right against your eye? Can we focus clearly that closely?
This is the marketing wet dream, forced ads right on the surface of your eyes.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Someone is driving on the freeway at night going 75 wearing the smart contacts. As a van is passed on a curve all the LEDs in the contacts light up fully. "Single car crash", states the report, "must have fallen asleep".
Nate
The Blue Cataract of Death.
rewriting history since 2109
I'm really excited about the future of augmented reality and augmented senses. I'd love to see enhancements for all our senses. The visual possibilities are obvious (facial recognition, distance calculation, displaying overlay information about whatever you're looking at), but the other senses are equally exciting:
Hearing: Augment my hearing so that when I'm in the dark I can have a sonar type display projected onto my eyes. Night vision is cool, but it still requires some light, and can be baffled by smoke - sonar would let people "see" in situations where they otherwise wouldn't. Throw in some filters, also - I'm listening to music while on a train, noise cancellation would be nice. I hear a snippet of song on the radio and want to know what it is - my new ears will recognize the song and tell me the name (and probably let me get it from iTunes or whatever right then, if I want).
Smell & Taste: For emergency services workers, it'd be great if they had a way of knowing what was in the air in a dangerous environment. Augmented smell would let them do that, or allow humans to sense other things that currently are too subtle for us to detect. There's been some work with dogs that could smell cancer - it'd be an interesting diagnostic tool to add smell to a quick medical scan. Or for foodies, we could take a bite of something and instantly be shown what's in it and in what proportion.
Touch: I'd just like to see something that would let me run my fingers over a surface and then translate that into visuals.
Obviously, all of this (and more) could be turned on/turned off by the user to make it unobtrusive if they wanted, and certainly there would be privacy issues.
One thing I do wonder about is how our brains would cope with being supported in this fashion - I know that my memory for things like phone numbers has gone to shit since I've begun using a cellphone, and while I'm much better at figuring out how to find information than I used to be, thanks to Google, I'm also a lot worse at keeping random facts in my head. What will happen to a generation of people raised without having to engage in tasks like having to remember people's names/faces/details? It could be interesting.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Even better, make those lenses so that they emit faint red light "outwards", scaring the crap out of most people that will look into your eyes.
(might be already doable, with "phosphor" & low intensity radiation source, like in Russian watches...not sure about the shielding and the risk of cataract though ;/ )
One that hath name thou can not otter
We've had this discussion before. I'll bring up the same point as I did last time: Contact lens displays are going to be limited by the power requirements. The solution they have in this article is equivalent to pressing a cellphone antenna up to your eyeball. It's not going to be healthy; a lot of people would go blind at that level of radiation.
My advice is to wait for the full computer-brain interface.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Could be kind of painful.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
These will definitely help me find Sarah Connor.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
When I mentioned the idea of contact-lens displays in a comment one year ago, I referred to them as "the magical world of tomorrow." I guess the future is coming sooner than I thought.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Yes thanks for that - obviously we here at Slashdot are clueless about what a platform is, without a reference to a pop culture reference. (Though I do wonder why you don't at least make a comparison to a more mainstream brand of phones, instead of one that's just a few per cent of the market.)
No, it couldn't possibly be an attempt to make a story more newsworthy with an "On Your Iphone" reference...
I don't have contacts, but from what i understand, they center on your cornea and move with your eye, right?
How would someone "look around" on a screen with contacts? Wouldn't the center of the screen always be what you're looking at, drastically minimizing what you can read and properly make out?
How do you focus on one side of the graph than the other? If you move your eyeball to the left to focus so does the image move to the left. You will not be able to shake your focus off the center of the image. If you have great periphery that may be fine, but only if you are stupid.
I'm still waiting for the brave new world where you can roll-up your display into a case the size of a pen
The whole "display on a contact lens" is even more vaporware than that.
And far as I can tell, the contact lenses, THEY DO NOTHING!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Welcome to my crib, here is the master bedroom, no plasma TV, but I've got some pretty sweet contact lenses in a drawer somewhere.
Can anyone shed some light on how the optics of a contact-lens display would work? After all, when all is said and done, this is going to be a display that is not simply "close" to your eye, but ON TOP of it, and I don't know about others, but my eyes are unable to focus on anything closer than 5 cm (2") or so.
There are mirror/lens systems in VR-helmets and those fancy spectacle-like, wearable displays that create a virtual display some distance away from the viewer, but I don't see how that could be replicated in a contact lens.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
we'll-use-them-as-huds-in-our-flying-cars dept-
actually typically HUDS are fixed on the vehicle body (at least in the fighter pilot community). These would be more like helmet (head) mounted cueing systems present in more modern day such as JHMCS http://www.vsi-hmcs.com/pages_hmcs/02_jhm.html
this sig is deprecated
Don't try to make a contact that does everything you think of. Get some that provide some functionality. An interface for smart phones s a great start.
Thise has killed a lot of products from the consumer market. For example, VR. Every body wanted to release a fully functional 3d VR with near perfect graphics. This was completly unreasonable for the consumer market.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The TFA has a video clip of a F16 HUD.
Either the pilot's flying skills are like mine (in a simulator), or he's a top aerobic performer.
It's hard to hear the engine noise clearly, a real testament to the noise cancellation quality.
Hmm, he landed perfectly at first try. He's a real good pilot.
I invision eye cancers :)
Make your significant other always look like their youthful self or someone else entirely. The next step being everyone always looking 'beautiful'.
Dennou Coil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennou_Coil
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I don't know that the technology is theoretically impossible, but I think articles like this usually gloss over this not at all minor technical difficulty. Transparent circuitry is much easier because of this same phenomenon. If you cover up 50% of the area of a contact lens with completely opaque circuitry, you won't see the circuits in your vision, you'll just see a reduced intensity as if you were wearing sunglasses, because the circuitry will be so out of focus it will appear uniform. If your circuitry is only covering 10% of the area, you probably won't even notice the difference.
Before putting displays in contact lenses, how about fixing the contact lens technology itself so you can actually wear them for longer than 10 hours without itching, stinging, and redness?
Hundreds of LEDs? Why, you could make a 10 X 10 pixel display with that.
Well, getting them on and off does. I have to wear glasses, as contacts either pop off at ten-minute intervals or stick on my eyeballs like they were glued there. If the optometrist bruises the hell out of your eye trying to pry the little frigger off, then contacts are not for you. (There is a =reason= Lenscrafters is still in business.) You can't wave it away with folksy home-remedies and anecdotal tales of adjustment - contact lenses are simply unusable for a significant chunk of the population, and building the next big interface around them is a sucker's game.
Figure out how to feed information into the optic nerve or vision centers of the brain non-intrusively, and you have a winner.
It's called "beer". It also has a disaster recovery mode if it doesn't work: "MORE beer".
Insert
I call it "The Ultimate Goatse Device"
I don't understand people wanting this and similar technology in a contact lens, we can already replace our original lenses (for reasons such as cataracts). Forget the contacts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraocular_lens
Bah!
Thank you. I've been wondering when someone would figure this out.
You can't scratch a letter onto the surface of a 35mm lens and expect that letter to show up on the film. It doesn't. It's in the wrong part of the light path.
You couldn't paint a letter onto the front of an eyeball and expect it to form an image on the retina. It won't. It's in the wrong part of the light path.
You could probably blink a red LED or a green one or a yellow one, and that might be useful. If your contact lens could _project_ light onto the retina, or out onto a surface, sure it would work. But it's near impossible to _project_ a focused, sharp image out of a structure less than a tenth of a mm thick.
None of the articles I've read have ever addressed this point.
Let's take a step back from the idea of contact lens displays to the lower-tech idea of wearable Head Mounted Displays. Where are they? It's been 20 or more years since the promise of Virtual Reality and yet I still can't go into the average computer store and by some VR goggles. You can buy them on-line of course but frankly they are awful. Most of them have low resolution and a field of view equivalent to a 14 inch monitor on your desk (cunningly advertised as being equivalent to 70 inch screen at 10 feet).
Field of view is really the most important thing for an immersive experience, not the 3D aspect. Imagine the impressive view you would get looking out from the top of a mountain. There is no useful 3D information in the scene since everything is too far away, but it certainly wouldn't feel fake despite the lack of 3D. If you look at the same mountain view through a tiny window though, suddenly you are now longer "there", and it just becomes a picture of a mountain view. That's the dire experience you get from today's narrow field of view. Even the super expensive HMDs that cost as much as a house do not provide a normal human field of view.
I think the problem is that there is no real drive to bring virtual reality to the consumer market. Companies are far too comfortable making games designed to be played on a low field of view window on the world that never moves. If one of the major console makers pushed the idea of VR, it might change things. I won't hold my breath though. I've been waiting 20 years for VR and there is just no will there to go with the idea despite all the technical advances we have made.
I guess it would work ok if the display were constantly changing, but static images on the retina fade pretty quickly. You might not notice it, but your eye is constantly moving (this is called saccadic movement) so that you keep being able to see things. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to see the stuff on these displays, because it will fade from vision like the blood vessels between your retina and your cornea.
Robocop vision for the masses!! Sweeeeeet...
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
...at only a slight disadvantage: you only see the perfect image once.
??
Profit !
I used (soft) contact lenses for a while, and those had a tendency to drift around a bit. Which was no problem for a lens that has the same refraction at every place. But when the same happens with the display lens, you might have one more offset to measure and consider.
C - the footgun of programming languages