Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Works On Virtual Reality Contact Lenses
gManZboy writes "Binoculars and night-vision goggles have their limits. So DARPA is doing work at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks to create wearable eye lenses with tiny, full-color displays onto which digital images can be projected, to give soldiers better situational awareness. The lenses would allow users to focus simultaneously on images that are both close up (perhaps a display) and far away (perhaps a battlefield.) Using virtual reality technologies to improve how soldiers perform on the battlefield has been a particular interest of the U.S. military for some time."
iOptiks? Cue Apple lawsuits in 5... 4... 3...
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
No double contacts. I wonder how this would affect those of us already wearing contacts. Prescription TV?
then we will all become Borg!
Ok, night vision goggles and binoculars as mentioned in the summary are big bulky things, so it would stand to reason that you wouldn't want to wear those all the time. But why jump straight to contacts? Why not make some the size of regular glasses, which you'd think would be a helluva lot easier? I wonder whose campaign(s) iOptiks brib^H^H^H donated to.
Well looks like someone at DARPA has been reading Rainbows End.
How would these cope with saccades? The eye makes a lot of involuntary, unnoticed movements.
Are soldiers actually using contact lenses on the battlefield? I'd think they might be a bit hard to keep clean and tidy, no? Does anyone know?
The article doesn't really give details on how it works. It sounds like these are just contacts you can project images onto. If that's true then you need a projector somewhere pointed at the eye. If that's true why bother with a projector rather than just using a pair of glasses? I'm not really seeing the advantage to this technology other than to say "hey we projected something directly onto someone's eye!"
Unless I'm mistaken and these have their own power source or something, which would be quite impressive.
I wonder how tedious job would it be to find and reattach a lost contact lens during a battle in a dusty environment.
It's obvious that this company was originally hired by Steve Jobs to produce contact lenses which change physical reality to match what is displayed on them.
They failed (the original development plan was to bootstrap the initial, barely-working devices to cause later ones to work better), so they're trying to cut their losses by selling this (comparatively oh so boring) tech to the military.
So, how long before the things can send infomation back? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Torchwood_items#C
What I'd be very interested in finding out, is how do they intend to power those things? Magnetic induction coils? Also an interesting problem, how to get the display signal in there? Is it going to be a general purpose display, or are the first versions things that have pre-defined fields? The latter seems easier from a bandwidth point of view, as even a relatively low resolution general purpose screen will need quite a lot of data to be transferred.
First you make it possible,
then you make it practical.
http://die-nachrichten.at/forum
This is going to do wonders for all the ugly people of the world
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
What no X-Ray Specs? I bet you could sell them to the Homeland Security folks, whether they worked or not. That would unnerve terrorist if they thought that the security folks could see through their clothes.
US soldiers had a similar problem in Afghanistan: country yokels thought that the soldiers' mirrored sunglasses could see through their wives burqas.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Just wait'll some one slips acid into a guys MRE then streams an episode of Walking Dead through the display.
I have no Idea how they hope to achieve that. The surface of the cornea is certainly not within the depth of field of the eye, regardless how close it focuses. Plus, they explicitly say that the idea is to allow the user to get enhanced visual information while focusing on targets far away. This is a fundamental problem with this concept.
Somehow, you have to shape the field so that it creates an overlapping image on the retina. Among the problem I quickly note are:
- Knowing how exactly to shape the field, implying you need to know exactly where the eye is focusing and track it actively.
- You need to compensate for eye movement... thus track those movement.
- And, last but not least, you need to actually shape the field to match.
All this is technically possible, but not within a compact lens. A large part of these problems have been implemented within laser eye surgery systems... which are somewhat bulky.
They might as well try to input data directly into the optical nerve... seems almost more plausible.
I always wonder how reality would it be for a children where virtual stuff is so real like everything else.
I would say, it is augmented reality, not virtual reality.
Virtual reality in lenses would be no fun at all - *especially* if the simulation is out of sync with the real world ^^
*sits half naked on couch brooding*
There, said it.
How do they get past the sensory adaptation issue though? Having a contact lens with an image on it applied directly to the eye will work for about 30 seconds to a minute, and then the brain filters that image out. Our eyes are constantly making tiny movements meant to change the light hitting any particular spot on the retina. If the same light hits the same spot continuously, that spot becomes "fatigued" and stops sending information to the brain. The brain then fills in the empty spot with assumptions from the area surrounding that spot. Unless the image on the lens was in a constant state of change, we would stop seeing it. Really, research into displays on contact lenses is old news, this has been going on for years. As far as I can tell, no one has come up with a solution for sensory adaptation. Now, before a flame war starts - I may well be wrong about any part of this statement. I'm operating from memory, and my very well be incorrect. If I am, please let me know.
Has anyone thought about the suitability of contact lenses in a warzone? It doesn't sound like the most practical of ideas.
I current wear RGP lenses to correct a major defect of vision, and after a long period of trying to get used to them (they hurt like hell to begin with) I can pop them in and practically forget about them. However, when I get a small piece of grit/dirt/eyelash/foreign body behind one of them it's pretty painful. Often to the point where I've got to stop what I'm doing to take out my lens and manually remove the irritation, or wait for my tears to flush it out.
Would a soldier in the middle of a battlefield be able to do this?
Dude, you need to revise your estimates.
Super-hot celebrity chicks by end of week do not equal anything by the end of the month. Try this.
Super-hot Celebrity Chick = 10,0000
Hot-Chick / Celebrity Chick = 1000
Average female of reproductive age = 100
A female of your species = 10
Hand-job in the shower = 1
Your dates have an issue, too.
End of Week = 10,0000
End of Month = 1000
End of year = 100
End of decade = 10
End of life - 1
Now that you have your scale set you can figure how many orders of magnitude down to adjust your expectations.
Super-Hot Celebrity Chick by end of the week would probably translate into a trip to the local street-walker.
Happy to help.
... They put 'em in MY eyes, too! *Car crash*
... IntercepTORS. Crap. This site needs an edit button. Or for me to drink coffee before posting.
"For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match."
-- JFK
You're reading the wrong script again.
"You'll dress only in attire specially sanctioned by MiB special services. You'll conform to the identity we give you, eat where we tell you, live where we tell you. From now on you'll have no identifying marks of any kind. You'll not stand out in any way. Your entire image is crafted to leave no lasting memory with anyone you encounter. You're a rumor, recognizable only as deja vu and dismissed just as quickly. You don't exist; you were never even born. Anonymity is your name. Silence your native tongue. You're no longer part of the System. You're above the System. Over it. Beyond it. We're "them." We're "they." We are the Men in Black. "
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Reminds me of the latest Mission Impossible:Ghost Recall movie where they have contact that provide a sort of data feed to a local smartphone. Though thinking about it, there seems to be an easier way to implement than a contact for the purposes they were using it for...
Why no one seems to get military-sized funding for such research as applied to industrial design, gardening, or just reading books?
Assume I have a fully addressable LCD contact lens, its powered somehow and receives signals somehow.
Do contacts rotate once they are on your eyeball?
Images stabilized on the retina (say, for example any opaque elements on a contact lens) quickly become invisible. Our visual system relies on very rapid, continuous, small eye movements that constantly change the position of the image of the external world on the retina. A contact lens display, on top of every other technical hurtle, would have to compensate for this in a way that the visual system could readily interpret. It would also take a lot of practice to get used to display elements displaced from the exact center of your vision that you could never move your eye to focus on (like trying to get a better look at a 'floater' in your eye that keeps moving away).
And of course there's also, "CEASE FIRE! CEASE FIRE! . . NOBODY MOVE, I LOST A LENS"
I suppose this would be more exciting if I could still wear contacts. Sjogren's Syndrome has given me 20% of normal tear volume, and I have plugs in my tear ducts to keep what little moisture my eyes do produce from draining away so fast. I never go anywhere without a bottle of eye drops.
While I'm an odd exception, glasses would be far more practical and usable by more people. Just get Oakley to make a pair and get ready to profit!
Necron69
http://hackaday.com/2011/12/20/ben-krasnow-sticks-leds-in-his-contacts-just-for-kicks/
oh no i can imagine it now; trolls going around placing qr codes on everything that trigger a link to goatse.you are walking some where and all of a sudden you have those images burned on you eyes. after several monthes of therapy every one starts researching how to disable auto launch on their contacts
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The iDoctor made me wear it after my iSurgery.
Free Martian Whores!
I'm pretty sure that the price of the integrated HUD display trumps your vision prescription. Shouldn't be a problem to shape the lens to fit.
Plus, it might not be possible to wear prescription glasses with the HUD contacts. It might effect the focal length.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
In WWII, somebody had the bright idea of putting calibration marks on contact lenses for aircraft spotters. The markings might as well have not been there. Turns out, if something isn't moving relative to the retina, the brain tunes it out, and it disappears. (That's why your eyes are always making little jiggling motions -- keeps the image moving on the retina.)
Now, if they have something that will project an image directly onto the retina, *that* would be something ...
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
skip the eyes and go straight on to a retinal nerve/pc interface
..is how on Earth they will be able to orient the lenses when they're in the eyes. I believe the lenses stick to the eyeball in more or less whatever way they are placed. However, even a slight misplacement would cause an image distortion when the brain gets around to processing what it sees, due to the fact that each eye needs to see the same thing (with corrections being made to take care of perspective).
To have VR, your eyes will have to be focusing on objects at different distances. The image displayed on the lenses therefore, will have to be configured therefore, to account for perspective variations. Even a slight change in lens orientation will be amplified with distance and wearers will end up with massive headaches and nausea.
Not to mention after all this, every time the wearer blinks, he could inadvertently re-orient the lenses.. Unless there's a way to prevent that from happening. I'm very curious to learn about it if there is!
Geekism is your _only_ God!
First thing I learned in the Army (well, not the first thing, but a very important thing) is you don't wear contacts in the field. Too unsanitary, incompatible with corrective inserts in gas mask, and fracking painful when you get a faceful of diesel smoke after being awake 24 hours. Plus, think it might be kind of awkward if your targeting display falls out of your eye on the ground?