bionic eye

It's the year 2023 and you're lost in a gigametropolis full of flying cars and robots who have achieved singularity. A guide literally appears before your eyes, giving you enough info about your surroundings to guide you on your way. The computerized contact lenses that Babak Parviz is developing could make this fantasy a reality.

Steve Austin had that enviable telescopic squint. Star Trek chief engineer Geordi La Forge saw darkness as daylight with his 24th-century ocular implants. And now it looks like a generation of very real people who have lost their sight are next in line for such seemingly sci-fi vision. “I’m hesitant to use the word ’superpower,’ ” says Armand R. Tanguay, Jr., an electrical-engineering professor at the University of Southern California who is building the world’s first implantable camera for the blind.

There are plenty of great ideas for the future out there. Predicting which ones will become more than ideas, which technologies will come storming into your life and flip it upside down—that’s dangerous business. But it sure is a rush. And it’s exactly what we’ve done in the pages that follow: We homed in on the most jaw-dropping research projects happening in five core realms and extrapolated just how—and when—they’ll come to exist.