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Pentagon Orders Dual-Focus Contact Lens Prototypes
New submitter cb_is_cool writes "From the Beeb: 'The Pentagon has put in an order for prototype contact lenses that give users a much wider field of vision. The lenses are designed to be paired with compact heads up display units — glasses that allow images to be projected onto their lenses.' Hopefully, any mugger within 50 yards will have a red status bar above his head. 'The central part of each lens sends light from the HUD towards the middle of the pupil, while the outer part sends light from the surrounding environment to the pupil's rim. The retina receives each image in focus, at the same time."
Download an app to give sex offenders a red status bar above their heads. Version 2.0 (beta) gives suspected social outcasts, as in people without Facebook accounts an orange status bar.
As mentioned at the end of the article, I wonder about the motion sickness possible with this stuff. I remember the first time I got glasses, how unbalanced I felt and unsure if I was misjudging where I was walking.
Dual-focus lenses like do produce sharp images at multiple focal ranges (or, in this case, from multiple sources) -- but they also produce blurred images at every focal range. So, you see a sharp image, but with halos around bright objects, and no way to mask them out. If you have to look at a white-on-black display, or a glowing readout in the dark, you're in for a real treat.
We already know how to integrate optics so your HUD shows things at a neutral focal distance. With holographic optics, we ought to be able to make such optics lightweight and compact enough for anyone's tastes. So why "correct" the eye to super-nearsightedness?
This seems like a solution to the wrong problem.
While it would be cool to highlight rapists and muggers with a red status bar, it would be really awesome if it could be tied into medical devices. Say you're a diabetic and you have a little device on your arm that constantly measures your blood sugar. Could help you maintain a more stable glucose level which has long-term health benefits. Or say you have a heart condition that leads to arrhythmias or PVC's? You could get a little readout that tells you that the alarming sensations you're feeling are ok within the baselines the device has set (or vice versa that you don't feel anything but that the device detects some serious abnormality). Something like a hitpoint meter that ACTUALLY shows some useful information regarding your medical condition.
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
Just out of curiosity, how is the soldier in the field supposed to deal with dust issues in contacts? Being a long-time wearer of contacts myself, and having experienced issues with wearing them in construction zones, I have a hard time seeing how these could be more of a liability in a combat arena.
"The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right." - Henrik Ibsen
FWIW: The standard IOL (inter-ocular lenses) that you get today if you have cataract surgery are generally of one focal length (mono-focal) and usually selected for far vision. Since IOLs are not attached to your squinting/focusing muscles so you pretty much need reading glasses to look at anything close up after you get them. However, there also exists today some multi-focal IOLs that seem like they work on a similar principle to the described contact lens.
FYI, the current generation of multi-focal IOLs have an inner region (focused to near-er objects) and one or more annulus regions (focusing on progressively farther objects). When the pupil is mostly closed (reading in bright light), you only see through the center of the lens allowing fairly clear near vision, but when your pupil is more dialated (when say outside, or in a dimly lit room) say you get images from one or more of the annulus regions which dominate the light received and are focused farther. It isn't a perfect solution as patients often initially see halos from the multi-focal parts, but apparently your brain apparently eventually learns to "filter" this out. There are better multi-focal IOLs in development (that allow for actual focus accommodation with eye muscles), but this is the common multi-focal case today.
With this scheme, it seems that the described contact lenses would have similar effect of the multi-focal IOL in its dialated pupil/far focus configuration except of course instead of part of the image originating from a near focus and thus blurry in the IOL case, would be replaced by a close distance Heads-up display and in clear focys on the retina. Seems like it might work just fine.
Of course with a contact lens like in the article, you can always take it off. With a multi-focal IOL, you are stuck with this all the time. On the other hand,100-of-thousands of folks have multi-focal IOLs for their cataract replacement and they voluntarily have this kind of stuff permanently sewn in their eyes, so there's no reason to think this won't just work.
Anything that gives the pentagon a wider field of vision has to be good for the world.
Do you mean "Highlight people who've been convicted of such crimes before"? If we, as a society, want that kind of ability, surely we don't need that kind of technology. Let's just brand all criminals with hot iron or a tattoo into their forehead and make sure that someone checks every 5 years or so that they've not gone through plastic surgery or such.
Of course, we don't want to do that (and for good reasons) so I can't help but think "WTF?" whenever I hear people think that new technology will "enable" that (as if it wasn't already possible) and that it'd be somehow desirable...
(Of course, if you just mean "Highlight people who're hiding in a bush, for example", ignore this response)