Look into my eyes, darling!

Futuristic lense displays covering your eye? Now that sounds like a great alternative to cheat in exams and the likes. But of course this could offer a vastly broader range of applications and opportunities. Getting information displayed right in front of your window into the world might become a mainstream technology pretty soon, as the equipment is advancing fast.


A HUD-like contact lense projecting information right on the eye ball. Source

A recent Economist article on the topic:

Smart Contact Lenses
Biotechnology: Smart contact lenses exploit the unusual characteristics of the eye to diagnose disease, deliver drugs and more besides 

Jun 2nd 2011 - The Economist

EYES can reveal an awful lot about somebody. Look into someone’s eyes and you can tell if he is happy or sad, truthful or insincere, sober or drunk. By peering deeper still, ophthalmologists are even able to gauge a person’s health, spotting far more than just conditions that affect the eye itself: hypertension and brain tumours can also be diagnosed by examining the retina. Eyes are in many respects windows on the body, even if they are not quite windows on the soul.

And now contact lenses, normally used to bring the outside world into focus, are making it possible to peer back in through these windows. The idea of “smart” contact lenses that can superimpose information on the wearer’s field of view has been around for a while, but contact lenses are also being developed that use embedded sensors and electronics to monitor disease and dispense drugs. Such devices may eventually be able to measure the level of cholesterol or alcohol in your blood and flash up an appropriate warning.

The technology has huge potential, says Babak Parviz, a researcher at the University of Washington, in Seattle, who is one of the pioneers of smart contact lenses. Such lenses could act as both sensors and displays, providing new ways for data to pass in and out of the body. By adding tiny light-emitting elements to contact lenses, it is becoming possible to map digital images directly onto the wearer’s field of vision to create a head-up display or augmented-reality overlay that requires no glasses, screen or headset. “The ultimate goal would be to have a fully fledged display,” says Dr Parviz. 


The first smart contact lenses are already on the market. The Triggerfish, created by Sensimed, a spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is a wirelessly powered contact lens designed to help people with glaucoma manage their treatment. It does this by continuously measuring the curvature of the eye over a 24-hour period using a tiny strain gauge, built using micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) technology, which is incorporated into the lens.


Read more:  http://www.economist.com/node/18750624