Move over handsfree audio, here comes handsfree mobile video — straight to your eyeball.
About 2 years ago I wrote a blog about this topic based on a picture I saw in some futuristic magazine. Finally that vision is turning into reality after reading about it in Technology Review .
“If you look at the structure of a lens, it’s just a simple polymer,” says Babak Parviz, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. A number of researchers are putting electronics into polymers to build flexible circuits or displays, for instance. “What we realized was, we can make a lot of functional devices that are really tiny, and they can be incorporated into a contact lens to do a lot more than just improve vision,” Parviz says
It’s only a matter of time when you will wear a contact lens projecting your phones display directly onto the eye. The polymer based lens incorporates metal circuitry and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to create a functional circuit biologically compatible with the eye.
So not only will we be listening and talking handsfree, but we will be watching handsfree too.
This lens has 16 working LEDs, which is sort of like the green display when PC’s first came out in the 70′s/80′s. So the team is also looking to shrink the LEDs whilst increasing the amount of LED’s on the lens so that the lens could enable a few hundred pixel display. The lens was made from a polyethylene tetraphthalate substrate– also know as PET the stuff used to make plastic bottles.
For those of you wearing lenses you will know the difference between a hard and soft lens. This lens, fully bio compatible, is very much like a hard lens. So when the team tested the lense in a rabbit’s eye for 20 minutes they found no adverse effects. However, they did not turn on the electronics while the lens was in the rabbit’s eye.
One of the key challenges seems to be like making high density chips: the heat generated in the circuitry. The other challenge is also the issue of providing power to the lens while it is in the eye.
[...] Ivan Tihienko had a vision where the world was exactly like Second Life. Actually, his vision was really about designing a new interface that went beyond on screen displays. His final project at the Bezalel academy of Arts and Design is a life size projection of commands and contextual information, which can be initiated by hand or foot gestures. It’s quite nice to see it’s potential for way finding and gaming purposes. However, the keyboard part is still up in the air for me. I’m not sure I’d want the rest of the world see my emails to my mum about her trip to Barcelona, or if they even want to bother with that either. His work is still very inspiring and maybe we’ll see something like this someday! [...]