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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.
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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.
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If I displayed a fullscreen hi-res photo of someone's eye on such a lens, would it pass retina scan?
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?
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How long did you try for? I started wearing contacts for flying and shooting (shooting with glasses gave me four different images to try to aim at because of the angle, and flying was problematic because they didn't fit well under the headphones). I was only putting them in once a week, and it took about ten to fifteen minutes. Once I started wearing them every day, I got much quicker. It also helped when my optician told me that any suggestions involving mirrors were nonsense. Don't look at your eye in a mirror when putting the lenses in, look straight at the lens and move your finger closer to your eye until they're in.
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These will definitely help me find Sarah Connor.
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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 long did you try for?
Months. Daily, for three months.
I started wearing contacts for flying and shooting (shooting with glasses gave me four different images to try to aim at because of the angle, and flying was problematic because they didn't fit well under the headphones). I was only putting them in once a week, and it took about ten to fifteen minutes. Once I started wearing them every day, I got much quicker. It also helped when my optician told me that any suggestions involving mirrors were nonsense. Don't look at your eye in a mirror when putting the lenses in, look straight at the lens and move your finger closer to your eye until they're in.
Not sure why this is modded informative. Every dispensing optician teaches you this when you get contacts for the first time. Like everything, practice usually works, but after blowing a half hour every day for three months I ran out of patience.
And if it falls out, or slips out of place, then another half hour putting it back in.
It's amazing what they have now. My left eye's natural lens (not the cornea, the one behind the iris) was replaced with an artificial lens that sits on struts, allowing it to focus. before the operation I wore contacts for my extreme nearsightedness, plus reading glasses for my age-related farsightedness (yes, you can be both nearsighted and farsighted at the same time; that's what they make bifocal glasses for). The vision in that eye is now BETTER thah 20/20 at all distances. I see better than most twenty year olds!
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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.
Hundreds of LEDs? Why, you could make a 10 X 10 pixel display with that.
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.