By Babak Parviz, as told to Flora Lichtman Posted 02.21.2012 at 11:13 am 4 Comments

Terminator Vision

"We made a lens that displays a single pixel that can be turned on and off wirelessly. An integrated circuit stores the energy, and a light-emitting diode shoots light toward the eye, but the optics are tricky. You can’t focus on something that’s that close. To correct this, we put a series of tiny lenses between the LED and the eye—imagine holding your finger too close to your eye so it’s blurry; you could bring it into focus by putting a magnifying glass between your eye and your finger.

So far, our display has only one pixel. But someday you could use the lenses to consolidate all the displays you interact with on a daily basis—your clock, computer, television and phone—into one personal display in your eye. In the distant future, your contact lenses could augment your reality. If you were in a bare hallway, the computer in your contact could put paintings on the wall.

The light-emitting part of the contact lens is opaque, but these little dark spots shouldn’t obscure vision. The control circuitry and the radio harvest energy from a transmitter at the edge of the lens and communicate with the world. They don’t block the view either. We don’t have permission to test the lenses on humans yet, but animals have worn it, and the lens was safe and functional." --Babak Parviz, electrical engineer at the University of Washington, as told to Flora Lichtman

Check out more from our Future of Medicine issue here.

4 Comments

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Porphy
02/21/12 at 11:37 am

What about non-contact lenses? So far, with how far these have come is there an option for it not to actually "contact" the eye and would this be a problem with the tech?

This is 100% a personal issue of course. I just can't psychologically handle watching an eye-drop commercial let alone place something in my eye.

Also, are there work-arounds for the many people suffering from astigmatisms?

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tokyoburns
02/21/12 at 2:46 pm

im reading michio kakus new book and so far he predicts that these will be the basis of all future media. cell phones and tvs will be replaced by these and well all have a pair.

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kormiko
02/21/12 at 8:40 pm

@Porphy

More than likely, we'll have glasses that can use this technology first. Contacts will come later. People who don't want to put contacts in their eyes will keep the glasses and only use them when they want/need to.

After contacts, this information will go directly into our brain. Embedded in a nano-scale processing chip(s). This will take some time for everyone to accept, but there will be some who will be the guinea pigs.

Main thing I worry about is having these contacts in while I'm driving and some hacker puts up a bunch of pop up spam that blocks my field of view. So, obviously, security/safety is a number one priority when these become available.

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Baaron
02/22/12 at 10:13 am

kind of wierd if you think about it. If these contact lenses are going to be the things decorating our rooms and basically making up our world why dont we just plug our selves into a computer like in the matrix?



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