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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!
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.
DARPA sets ambitious goals in order to make faster progress.
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.
DARPA sets ambitious goals in order to make faster progress.
How do ambitious goals make faster progress?
With that logic I hereby set as a goal to get laid by no less than three hot celebrities by the end of the week; Eva Mendes, Jessica Alba, and that volcanic hot blonde from Chuck.
Accordingly this means that progress will be achieved faster and I should get laid by a reasonably good looking, conscious and otherwise not impaired, healthy woman by the end of the month.
I'll let you know how that works out.
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
I'd say someone watched torchwood
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
You laugh, but your odds of getting a reasonably good looking woman to sleep with you would go up if you groomed, dressed, and carried yourself the way you would while trying to pick up a supermodel.
If you just take the path of least resistance (ugliest girl left at last call, to continue the analogy), you'll never know what you're capable of.
Leaving the basement, washing and going to a club might help with that. You can't expect progress without effort - a goal is just a direction.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
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 wonder how tedious job would it be to find and reattach a lost contact lens during a battle in a dusty environment.
In this case you simply have to carry on without the lens, like when your radio quits working, or you run out of your finite supply of ammunition.
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 ^^
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.
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"
..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!