Slashdot Mirror
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 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.'"
Read the article - contact lens is a fresnel lens
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.
From TFA comment:
To focus the light on the rabbit's retina, the contact lens itself was fabricated as a Fresnel lens - in which a series of concentric annular sections is used to generate the ultrashort focal length needed.
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.
You should get a research position with the lab, you obviously have a far deeper understanding of the subject.
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.
Unfortunately it cannot hide people being douchebags.
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.
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.
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.
Does that mean you would have to take off the contact lens in order to see other stuff clearly (e.g. stuff not on the display)?
Otherwise you'd then have to wait for tech that can either focus for both or switch between display and "real world" (maybe even rapidly).
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.
First time my butt... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080117125636.htm 2008, with photo of an even more complex working lens, on a rabbit's eye. From Slashdot, http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/01/17/1921217/bionic-contact-lens-may-lead-to-overlay-displays and http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/01/1619248/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens from 2008 and 2009, respectively. Took a while to sort through all the google echos of this being the first time, to get to the older pages where it had already been done. Though it is comforting to know that even more people are working to help create our soon to be our Human-Rabit hybrid Cybernetic overlords, whom I, for one, will welcome.
Question reality.
Now that that's out of the way... Even a single pixel can be quite useful if applied correctly. Use it as a toxin/radiation alert in high risk situations. Covert navigation. Just always knowing due north in any condition can permit a skilled navigator to get most any where, and would be unlikely to be picked up by enemy nightvision, unlike a glowing compass. Communications, mores code as mentioned in a post below, useful in covert tactical, even if used for nothing more then a 'holy (whatever)! Abort! Abort! Evac!' signal. Covert display for a concealed radar detector for the states that do not permit radar detectors. A signal to let your pet bunny know that you put food out. Why, the possibilities are near endless. Incorporate eye motion, and you can even have Pong any where you are. Heck, work in augmented reality and you can Pong between buildings as you walk.
Question reality.
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.
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.
...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