Solar-Powered Augmented Reality Contact Lenses

ByronScott writes "Want eyesight that could put your neighborhood cyborg to shame? Well, University of Washington professor Babak Amir Parviz and his students are working on solar-powered contact lenses embedded with hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, letting wearers experience augmented reality right through their eyes. If their research proves successful, the applications — from health monitoring to gameplay to just plain bionic sight — could be endless."

Comments

Yes I Do Want

[alex_guy_CA]

Oh my. Yes indeed, if that is not the coolest sounding thing I've heard all day, I don't know what is.

Though now that I think a little more, a spam attack on your eyeballs could be troubling...

Re:Yes I Do Want

[socsoc]

Just wait for the malware on whatever drives the display... You could actually punch the monkey and win!

Re:Yes I Do Want

[girlintraining]

Though now that I think a little more, a spam attack on your eyeballs could be troubling...

People always think of the best outcome when a new technology is created, forgetting the cesspool we call humanity that's going to use and pervert it. The day you have bionic eyes is the day people start paying good money to augment your "virtual reality" to replace competitors advertisements, add advertisements onto everyday objects surrepticiously, and what you'll end up with is drowning in useless information just as much now, sitting at your keyboard reading this, except you won't be able to unplug.

Most of my friends have the social expectation that if they send me a text or email, I reply in a few minutes, a half hour tops. Any longer, and they think something's gone wrong, and start calling me and everyone I know to find out what happened. God help us all the day we're linked continuously with each other over a massive communications network; Kiss democracy goodbye, privacy, anonymity, freedom, and the right to choose how you life your life goodbye. It'll all be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It'll be like Ghost in the Shell, with police, government agents, and large corporations being able to cloak themselves from being seen. And there won't be trials anymore -- the bionic eye's constant connection with the network will mean everything you see from the moment you wakeup until you go to bed will be available for review. They'll make their use mandatory because it results in zero crime. Or so they'll say.

It isn't fear-mongering to expect this. Not fifteen years ago when the internet was in its infancy, most of what was out there was high quality scientific research and most of the e-mails being sent were between real people, having real conversations. Today, it's a cesspool where 99% of what your inbox gets hit with is someone trying to sell you something. Every window into the web has advertisements hanging off of it. And here in Minnesota, the Supreme Court recently ruled that it was okay for people to be convicted of DUI if they could have been capable of operating a motor vehicle. People being thrown in jail because of the possibility that a crime could have occurred -- it is no longer necessary that the public (or yourself) be harmed for the law to reach into your lives. Today we live in a society where the merest possibility of a person engaging in a criminal act is sufficient grounds for conviction.

Technology does not change the way people think. Human intellectual capacity has not altered in the past 4,000 years (at least) as far as we can tell. We can laugh at people who believed the world was flat, but the fault is ours for doing so -- we did not understand how they saw the world. There wasn't anything wrong with their eyes, or their brains. We're fundamentally no smarter than they were. But we think we are. And we're so confident, so smugly superior to our predecessors that we know this future can't happen.

Of course there will be trials. And freedom. And democracy. And all that good stuff. We know it because, well, gosh darn it, that's how it has to be.

No.

No it doesn't.

All these things we value will die, and we can't blame technology for it. All technology does, this one included, is expose and direct us towards the fundamental question of what it means to be human. And let me just say -- that definition is not sunshine and rainbows. We were given free will. Nowhere in that does it say we are in any way inclined to do good; When it comes right down to it, very few people truly trust one another, and we'd believe our own direct sensory experiences over what anyone would tell us. We imitate others. That's all culture is -- the direct observation of our environment, which is translated into coping mechanisms (behaviors) that we then interpose between ourselves and it.

So tell me, where does that leave us when those sensory experiences become artificial and malleable?

Problems

[rabiddeity]

There are several difficulties with this type of system that have prevented it from becoming a reality. Here are a few:

1. This is too close to the eye to be able to resolve focus in most situations. The light isn't collimated or directional (it appears to be focused with some sort of "microlens" system), so one LED turned on can spread out to stimulate a wide patch of retinal cells. With any regular LED system you'd just see a big blur. For information requiring a single light this isn't a problem (flash an LED on/off under certain conditions, or change the color) but anything more will require something which can project cleanly onto the retina. This is not a trivial problem.
2. The detail-oriented part of your retina is near the center, in a part called the fovea. While you think your vision is equally clear across a wide range, this is actually a trick of your brain. Your eyes are quite sensitive to rapid movement (low latency) on the edges, and more sensitive to detail in the center. When observing fine detail such as text, your eye actually "scans" an area and forms a larger, detailed image from the composite. Even if you could project the light cleanly 1:1 onto the retina, for any textual/HUD information you'd have to track eye motion very precisely and provide the information that the brain "expects" to see at each point. And again, the light has to be projected onto a very small part of the retina.
3. Retinal cells can get easily overstimulated, much like the burn-in on old CRTs. Even when looking at one object of normal intensity for any period of time longer than a few seconds, your eye will "jitter" back and forth. This involuntary movement is called nystagmus, and your brain compensates for it. (The rhythm changes when alcohol or drugs are ingested, which is why nystagmus tests are part of a DUI test.) Lab tests have shown that when the eye is physically restrained from moving in this way, objects effectively become invisible to the subject. So any 1:1 projection would also have to track nystagmus and then "jitter" in the same way as the eye, or the conveyed information would also become invisible.