Research: Contact Lens Displays

Below is an excerpt from a website detailing a new contact lens digital display and some of the possibilities it may have for the future. This is very interesting because if developed further it will revolutionise many areas. Screen size in mobile devices will no longer be an issue. Gaming will be transformed as we will see the birth of the first immersive environments. Augmented Reality systems will also become a main stream technology. This contact lens technology will also have the capacity to provide round the clock health checks through bio-censors placed on them. These are just some of the areas covered n the article, read on for the rest…

The University of Washington has used microscopic scale manufacturing techniques to combine a flexible contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. Though in its infancy, the combination of a wearable contact lens with embedded optoelectronic and electronic devices promises many things, most notably this could well be the beginning of the Computer Human Interface of the future.

Accordingly, the University of Washington, there contact lens offers the promise of a viable large screen display alternative for connecting users with various mobile devices. Project head and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Babak Parviz envisages that his team’s electronic contact lens will offer the ability to superimpose a transparent high resolution display over the field of vision of one, maybe both eyes of the wearer.

"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," says Parviz.

Apart from the expectation of eventually offering a large screen display for our wearable and micro computers, PDAs and phones, the heads-up aspect of the contact lens leaves the way open for a democratization of Augmented Reality.
Unlike Virtual Reality, where the user's field of view is completely replaced with an artificial visual environment, Augmented Reality uses head tracking in conjunction with augmented vision to overlay complimentary information on the user's view.

The system can tell which direction the user is looking and adjusts the displayed image accordingly, displaying new and appropriate information for the scene being viewed.

If these tools were readily available and in mass usage, a plethora of new applications for augmented reality would almost certainly come to light.
Video-game companies could use the contact lens to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. In Communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a display screen that only they would be able to see.

One of the aspects of the UW Contact Lens most likely to capture the imagination of the public is its promise of bionic vision. “Using nanotechnology you can extend the sophistication of the contact lens as far as you like,” says Parviz. “There is interest in including cameras on the contact lens and incorporating other lenses so that, for example, if you were looking at something very small, you would be able to zoom in to get a closer look. Similarly, if something is far away, you would be able to zoom in.”

With an array of lenses wirelessly connected to a wearable computer, there’s obviously the capability of “recording images”. The possibilities are almost endless once someone is wearing such a contact lens. With the ability to record everything we see, which the UW Contact lens will ultimately enable, the concept of privacy, instant recall and a whole host of new capabilities come into play. A decade from now, recording everything we say and do is now a distinct possibility.
Bio-sensing and a wearable health monitoring system.

Perhaps the most left-field aspect to the UW study is the promise of a wearable health monitoring system. “The second big area that we are looking at is bio-sensing, because on the surface of the contact lens there are a lot of biomarkers already present that are important for monitoring health care,” explains Parviz.
“We recognized that if we could have a contact lens that incorporated biosensors that could sample the biology of the eye we could constantly report it outside, and hence have a non-invasive way of putting people on continuous health monitoring.”
What’s more, the system also has the capability of displaying the key indicators in real time to the wearer.

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