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Electronic Contact Lens Displays Pixels On the Eye
An anonymous reader writes "The future of augmented-reality technology is here — as long as you're a rabbit. Bioengineers have placed the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into the eyes of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans. The bunnies suffered no ill effects, the researchers say."
A single pixel. One might even say, First Pixel!
A strange coincidence that I happen to be reading Rainbows End right now.
I've been dreaming about this since forever.
If they can work CCDs into them too so they can function as an eyetap I'll sell everything I own except maybe my truck to get them. (gonna need a new portable computer to go with anyway)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can't focus on anything that close to the lens.
Pixel, singular. Not Pixels. Just one pixel so far.
The bunnies suffered no ill effects until one researcher rickrolled them (purely in the name of science) and well we can't post the footage of what happened then but use your imagination and then add more blood.
I mean, the eye can't focus that closely, so the lens would have to project an image that appears to be coming from further away, or be aimed in such way that the current focus of the eye doesn't matter, and it always enters the retina at the right spots.
Seems to pave the way towards a whole new way to goof off in the classroom: play the latest 3d shooter with eyes on the teacher and appearing to be paying complete attention.
Can the Bioengineers have placed the keyboard into the hands of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans?
Another place to put ads!
This breakthrough should, among other practical uses, replace paper bags.
It may very well be practical to put electronics next to the eyeball to do a display or whatever, but you do NOT want to put any kind of RF source/sink there. There would only be two ways to power such a unit - solar and RF energy beamed in ala RFID. The pictures I've seen suggest the latter. Having a resonant antenna at such frequencies would scare the heck out of me. Local heating or perhaps re-radiation at microwave frequencies next to something that is essentially H2O? You do KNOW that is why microwave ovens work.
I think I'll stick with LCD monitors.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
You can't read text in your peripheral vision. The best they could hope for would be sticking rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) text in the fovea (i.e. flashing up a rapid sequence of words right in the centre of the visual field). This could work, but it's hard to see why anybody would want it. You wouldn't be able to multi-task, because the text would be in the way. You wouldn't be able to access the text in a non-serial fashion either, which removes any advantage over having it presented in audio form.
We already have to remove shoes.
We already are subject to full body scans.
Soon we will have to remove our contacts just we receive messages from the devil whilst we are flying.
Then there is the chance that the CIA will quietly kill this tech.Farr too James Bond for us normal plebs to be alloed anywhere near it.
I guess I'm going to have to relearn Morse code.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Am I the only one who fears this simply for the possibility of advertisers using it to force us to view even more ads? FF a DVR past commercials? Ads. Popup block on . Ads. Walking down the street, in front of my business? Ads.
Specially if you mix this with porn, POV movies would be perfect.
I for one welcome our new lagomorphic cyborg overlords.
the next big thing: hijack other people's vision by cracking whatever needs to be cracked (and it seems there is nothing to crack there, except the frequency at this point), send advertising directly into people's eyes.
You can't even CLOSE your eyes at that point, you close your eyes and the images still keep on coming! (which, by the way, could be a new way to do something about insomnia for some people, just project the jumping sheep right into the eyes for a while).
You can't handle the truth.
This will pave the way to a whole new way to goof off in class: Kids will have their eyes and "full attention" on the teacher, all the while playing 3d-shooters or watching porn!
Direct brain interfaces are more interesting and will put augmented reality tech on the back shelf anyhow.
A somewhat older but more detailed article.
You only need very few pixels to make a working digital clock.
So first application: digital eye watch.
But what if they added a motion sensor so that they can switch the pixel on and off while the user is moving his eye, depending on the direction he's looking at? Would they be able to create a shape like that? (A bit like the clock with a single row of LED's swinging back and forth to display time). Of course you'd have to keep moving your eye continuously to see the shape...
>> powered remotely using ... gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit's eye
>> tests showed no damage or abrasions to the rabbit's eyes after the lenses were removed. ... so wait... sending high energy microwaves into an eye suddenly doesn't cook it any more?
Is it possible to track an eye that fast?
Probably not currently. But then, last year, we couldn't put pixels on your eye lens. I don't know of any absolute reason why applied technology couldn't solve this problem (i.e., no law of nature prevents it). So I would guess we'd get exactly that.
Combined with a good model of your environment, and the VR system can put the text on any surface. Now all T-shirts can have amusing slogans on them!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I wear glasses already, so I'm already used to it.
And frankly, I don't want anyone messing with my eyes.
Plus when it's broken you would not need a surgeon
And putting it on the glasses also solves the peripheral vision problem! If they can make the display small enough to fit in the eye, it's not really harder to make a non intrusive display on glasses.
Yes I know it's all fiction and all that, but I always seem to imagine the whole "Robocop/Terminator" vision thing as taking place inside their brain rather than on the surface of their eyes. Something like video gen-lock that takes the video feed and overlays text on top, bypassing the whole focusing issue. I remember trying to visualize what how that would work in a pair of glasses, so I put my cellphone right up to my eye while trying to keep the screen in focus. I could, sort of painfully. Then I also realized that I would need to focus on the everything else. I would have to focus on something very close and far away, at the same time. I would like to know how they accomplished this.
I find it interesting that animals are actually the forerunners in practical use of almost any technology. I bet they still can't beat the poor future tripper whose lenses have dried up and stuck to the eyeballs. If only people would apply as much care and reason to applying the tech as the scientists when handling the poor beings.
Burning like fire.
This is what they don't want you to See!
They are trying to CENSOR the side effects!
Information wants to be free!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcxKIJTb3Hg
You can't keep us silent
BPCRMRAV Forever!!!
~Brotherhood for the Prevention of Cruelty to Rabbits by Means of Rick Astley Videos
You seem to have some weird obsession with women who look like bitches.
Noticeably absent from your list:
Alyson Hannigan
Laura Bertram
Amanda Tapping
Megan Fox
Jewel Staite
Cate Blanchett
Julie Benz
No character -- that I am aware of -- had electronic contact lenses in the movie Terminator. I don't recall John Connor or Kyle Reese wearing such lenses. The titular character had a graphical display overlay on the visual input from it's "eyes", but it did not wear contact lenses.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
px are for kids!
Contact lenses are not at all comfortable. If I ran a company that makes eye drops, I'd be pouring all the money I could into that technology's development.
It does bode well with research like that, for glasses displays which don't suck. After all the lens material could just as well be embedded in glass/plastic and framed.
With our super contacts just look at your paper and copy the results.
You can't handle the truth.
Once everyone gets RFID chipped, you could get name info as you see them, and tag the name with comments, so next time you see that a-hole in a crowd, there would be a bubble over her head displaying "A-HOLE" Useful, too bad you can't do it with car drivers already.. The future is bright.
"If the only tool that you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Donny Rumsfeld
I hope someone out there realizes that contact lens display will require an entirely new rendering paradigm for virtual reality (or 3D graphics in general -- but if you have a contact lens display with essentially 360 field of view, why NOT do Virtual Reality?).
The eye only sees about 2-3 degrees at once, and scans the scene so that your brain can create a 3D reconstruction. Instead of just pushing a high number of pixels at a high FPS, it will make a LOT more sense to track the eye and render what the viewer is looking at in very high resolution, and the rest of the scene in lower resolution. This needs to be done with both eyes while taking into account vergence and accommodation (which object each eye is pointing at, and where the eye is focusing).
If 3D graphics researchers are smart, I see a LOT of good research coming up in rendering paradigms made possible by this type of display which give an effective 100+ megapixel display while using only several megapixels of rendering capability...
If they are NOT smart, we'll see some heads-up display type of applications with annoying text which moves with your eye movement ...
There is some preliminary work being done which may aid this in Foveated Rendering.
Now for the digital hearing aid, which will transform anything said to me into a compliment.
Gently reply
I've actually been to one of the lectures of the team that makes this. Guess who contracted them? The DoD.
Nevertheless, the samples I've seen are pretty good. Too bad they can't go beyond 16x16 right now, and that's around $10k a piece.
But there are technical hurdles.
One is the power requirements. How bright do the LED's need to be being so close to the eye. Next there would need to be very fast electronic processing in the contact lenses, and it would have to be very fast. It would need to be able to process a radio signal and display the results in real time and there would need to be enough radio spectrum and data throughput for at least three people or four people within a cubic meter. So obviously the first displays will be monochromatic and a very simple self generated text/vector displays rather than video. That would be sufficient for a HUD setup. The lenses will probably be expensive so more than likely they would be implanted within the eye like artificial corneas and will likely take up the entire surface of the eye and require removal of the eyeball from the socket for implantation.
They will need a refresh rate at least ten times faster than the eye and be able to detect orientation and focus and be able to compensate. Only what is in the center of vision would need to be in focus.
Then there is the question of heat generation. Even a small amount of heat my degrade the health of an eye. The more processing the contact lens does the more heat it generates. While I do think that someday electronics may be low power enough to run on the equivalent power of static electricity shock for an hour we are nowhere near there yet and probably won't be for a hundred years.
I see implants that tap into the optic nerves as far more likely and realistic. They could run on glucose and oxygen in the blood and could generate a little heat while being tolerant of our bodies latent heat. If the device doesn't generate a signal the the optic nerve would operate normally but with an active signal and under normal circumstances it would be switched to an artificial processed signal. Imagine televisions being no more than a green screen but having an overlay of a video signal generated electronically inside your head. I can also imagine artificially perfect eyes mechanically similar to our natural ones but far superior being offered as replacements once the optic nerve can be tapped. The bionic eye could be feasible to where you could recognize someone a football field away and or focus on things very close up. A greater sensitivity to light to see in the dark as well as frequency shifting effects so you can see infrared and ultraviolet light.
"The bunnies suffered no ill effects, the researchers say"
Ha ha ha... how amusing...
Remember, they're "bunnies" now, so that nobody dares to think about them as living, feeling beings.
So if they "suffered no ill effects", where is the video of what these sociopaths did to them? Do you imagine that having an operation on your eye, being performed by a sociopath who views you as an inanimate toy, to be played with and used in any way he thinks fit, is not agony?
What if it was YOUR eye? Would that be okay? What if it was YOUR life? Would that be okay?
Perhaps somebody can tell me why you think a human is worth more than an animal.
Last time I looked, animals weren't killing millions of human beings every year. And animals weren't killing tens of BILLIONS of animals every year either, because there are too few carnivores to do such a thing. And animals aren't raping human beings, attacking you in the street, breaking into your house and ruining your life, or bombing innocent people in countries all over the world.
Yet these same human beings are put forward as the epitomy of all that's good, and animals are just 'not human' and therefore worthless.
You'll notice that none of the jerks on Slashdot are capable of feeling the suffering of others, which means they haven't progressed beyond the emotional abilities of a six month old baby...
How will they address the contact lens movment? Usually the lenses move with each blink.
What about the corneas oxygenation? It will go lower with each thing (more pixels, power lines, etc.) they put inside the lens.
...loaded with Windows eye9, driving along in my spanking brand new Jag XF, when suddenly...
No. I don't even want to think about the whole new dimension to "Blue Screen Of Death".
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
How do we know? Perhaps the poor bunnies all are soldiering on through terrific migranes... :D
Cyrus Grissom: Make a move and the bunny gets it.
Bunny: I calculate an 83% probability that you will not pull the trigger.
I don't see why they are bothering with rabbits. Torchwood had model that worked with human eyes years ago!
In addition to being able to display text to the wearer wirelessly, the contact lenses also double as a camera, so that they transmit what the wearer is seeing back to a laptop.
Documented here.
I wonder if the first person to hack in that thing will push the goatseman on unsuspecting eyes...