Bionic contact lens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bionic contact lenses are being developed to provide a virtual display that could have a variety of uses from assisting the visually impaired to the video game industry.[1] The device will have the form of a conventional contact lens with added bionics technology.[2] The lens will eventually have functional electronic circuits and infrared lights to create a virtual display.[citation needed]
Babak Parviz, a University of Washington assistant professor of electrical engineering is quoted as saying "Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside.”[3]
Successful test for electronic contact lens | ZDNet
Researchers at the University of Washington and Aalto University, Finland, have built a prototype electronic contact lens and demonstrated its safety by testing it on live rabbit eyes.
The researchers report no signs of adverse side effects in a study published today in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering,
“We have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radiofrequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit,” said lead researcher, Babak Parviz.
One Per Cent: Electronic contact lens displays pixels on the eyes
The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit's eye. To focus the light on the rabbit's retina, the contact lens itself was fabricated as a Fresnel lens - in which a series of concentric annular sections is used to generate the ultrashort focal length needed.
They found their lens LED glowed brightly up to a metre away from the radio source in free space, but needed to be 2 centimetres away when the lens was placed in a rabbit's eye and the wireless reception was affected by body fluids. All the 40-minute-long tests on live rabbits were performed under general anaesthetic and showed that the display worked well - and fluroescence tests showed no damage or abrasions to the rabbit's eyes after the lenses were removed.
Related
- BBC News - Bionic contact lens 'to project emails before eyes'
- Bionic Contact Lens Could Stream Emails, News And Medical Information
- 'Terminator' contact lens for rabbits; humans are next - latimes.com
- Terminator-style info-vision takes step towards reality
- A single-pixel wireless contact lens display
- Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens - IEEE Spectrum