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Call me skeptical, but looking at that photograph it looks nothing like something I want to put in my eyes. This product is way too much of a moonshot - the pr

by Closi 4y ago

Call me skeptical, but looking at that photograph it looks nothing like something I want to put in my eyes. This product is way too much of a moonshot - the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years. There is a reason that all the research in contact lenses to date has been to make them as light and thin as possible. Companies can't really make a standard contact lens that lasts more than a month without compromising on comfort and it sliding around your eyeball - so how we think they are going to solve that PLUS add a battery and a load of electronics and make it something people will actually want to wear is a mystery to me. No doubt eventually this level of technology will come, but I can't see it coming in the timelines required for Mojo to be a commercial success (unless there is some other plan to commercialise the IP).

bergenty 4y ago
They have a functioning prototype. Who are you and why does your opinion matter? (I’m just sick of skepticism automatically being associated with intelligence).
- Sebguer 4y ago
  I have a pretty cut and dry rule of not putting anything that can catch fire directly on my eyeball.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    People said the same thing about LASIK.
    - echelon 4y ago
      LASIK is a one and done operation performed under the careful supervision of a doctor, and it has been tried and tested hundreds of thousands of times. The probability of failure for this device is nonzero and and increases the longer you wear it. The failure modes are potentially disastrous, and there's likely no medical personnel nearby to intervene.
      - birdman3131 4y ago
        Anecdotal but lasik seriously messed with my dads eyesight for over a year. And he drove an OTR truck (at night quite a bit). Had he been aware how bad it was and that it only lasted 10 years or so he said he would have stuck to glasses.
        LooseMarmoset 4y ago
        I had lasik in 1999. I was legally blind (uncorrected) in my left eye, and needed a pretty serious correction in my right eye. After lasik, my vision was 20/15 (left) and 20/10 (right). Now, in 2022, I still have no need of glasses, although I'd say my vision has degraded somewhat - still good enough to pass the driver exam uncorrected, however. Night vision is objectively worse after lasik. Poorer light sensitivity, and for the first year, I had halos and starbursts around night light sources, especially when my eyes were tired/dry. This improved over time, however. I'd do it all over again if I had to. I couldn't wear contacts anymore, they hurt my eyes, and I got used to navigating like a blind person when I didn't have my glasses, so lasik is a miraculous improvement.
        ckw 4y ago
        When I looked into it a couple years ago, around 1% of procedures resulted in markedly diminished quality of life, with the most extreme cases regularly leading to the suicide of the patient, so I decided against it. Periodically I look back on the decision, and feel a great sense of relief. I count it among the best I have made.
        kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        Corneal flap also also mechanically weakens the eye.
        euroderf 4y ago
        What does it do to your near-in sight though ? Can you read ingredients labels ?
    - Sebguer 4y ago
      Yeah, and the risks of LASIK are widely under-reported!
- echelon 4y ago
  I'm extremely wary of putting high energy density chemicals into or near my eyes. Not unless there's a medical need or millions of hours of testing on other people first.
- nwiswell 4y ago
  I'm sympathetic to the skepticism overdose, but ultimately this is a fallacious appeal to authority. GP makes good points. Even the Google/Verily glucose contact lens didn't work out and this is an order of magnitude more complicated. Do we really believe that the deal breaker for Google Glass was just that it made you look like a dork? Because that is the only problem the contact lens seems to solve, and it introduces a whole host of new problems. I'm not sure I feel great about putting a battery straight into my eyeball after seeing what they can do to cars and laptops when they fail.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    In my opinion, the contact lenses solve a whole lot of issues. Invisible to people around you, literally captures the entirety of your retina, no motion sickness, higher fidelity and did I mention completely invisible to everyone around you making uptake on this seamless.
    - nwiswell 4y ago
      > Invisible to people around you Not based on the PR photo. It would be very obvious to anyone who makes eye contact with you.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      Ok, let's diligence this, so our skepticism isn't unfounded: >Invisible to people around you. Except for the not-built body-wearable computer that will eventually run the things [0] > literally captures the entirety of your retina This prototype covers <20% of your field of vision [1] >no motion sickness, higher fidelity I think you're comparing this to headsets, but I can tell you from [1] that this is not 'high-fidelity' by any means (for one, it's monochrome and each pixel is binary on or off) Another problem to think about: A sunny day is c. 30k nits. From the looks of the photo, this display is maybe 100 nits. IT will be nearly impossible to see the display outdoors. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVAMRe3kmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVAMRe3kmA - [1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/30/mojo-vision-reveals-the-worlds-smallest-and-densest-micro-display/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/30/mojo-vision-reveals-the-w...
- pdpi 4y ago
  Whatever tech could make these AR contacts comfortable to wear all day would be worth a fortune for plain old prescription contacts. I’m willing, he’ll I’d be happy and excited, to be proven wrong here, but it seems to me that the balance of probability tips in favour of them having something half-baked and non-viable, and my eyes are definitely too precious to risk them on a bad v1 product
  - hinkley 4y ago
    To be fair, AR contact lenses could more easily absorb a $10 premium on a material that is more comfortable for extended wear than regular contact lenses. Yes, it would be good if contacts were more comfortable, but maybe it's a cost problem rather than a lack of capability.
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      The contacts are expensive, yes, but for a lot of people (myself included) they could still easily be sold at twice the price if material was more comfortable.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Monthlies are 95% water and dailies are 97% in modern hydrogel lenses. Anything you can build electronics into will be a downgrade from this.
- _Adam 4y ago
  They have flexible PCB on a contact lens, and an anecdote by the CEO. "Functioning" is too generous.
- Closi 4y ago
  > They have a functioning prototype. Who are you and why does your opinion matter? I'm allowed to share my opinion on here, it's an internet forum dude. Besides, I don't need a PhD to work out that I don't want to put that thing on my eyeball, or that some of the claims are pretty fantastical compared to the proof given. If they put their prototype on Marques Brownlee or Linus and they said it was good then I would be inclined to believe it. But the CEO being the only wearer and then saying "wowowoww my product is so good this is amazing" isn't too convincing to me. There are plenty of functional prototypes that never become a viable product. This, to me, has the smell of a company that won't be able to bring the product to fruition.
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    “I don’t like it”, which is what this comment can be summarized as, is a perfectly valid opinion. But it’s quite different from “the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years” which is pure speculation and dismisses the entire news as.. a lie, I guess?
    - FooHentai 4y ago
      Reducing op's post to your own summary, then attacking that summary, is not making a point in good faith. Besides, it's not pure speculation, it's sitting on very solid foundations of reasoning that were outlined in the earlier post - Current cutting-edge tech for regular contact lenses has resulted in something (silicone hydro-gel) that lasts at best a month before it breaks down, but allows airflow through to the eye which is very important for long-term use and comfort. It's fair to be skeptical about overcoming this issue, which reasonably you would have to do if you're going to layer in some expensive tech and give a user a reasonable lifetime from the product.
    - Closi 4y ago
      > “the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years” which is pure speculation and dismisses the entire news as.. a lie, I guess? We shouldn't take what we read in a PR piece for granted. See: https://swimswam.com/artificial-gills-breath-underwater-like-james-bond/ https://swimswam.com/artificial-gills-breath-underwater-like... https://wccftech.com/skarp-laser-razor/ https://wccftech.com/skarp-laser-razor/ https://greenerideal.com/news/vehicles/0627-solar-powered-roadways/ https://greenerideal.com/news/vehicles/0627-solar-powered-ro... And even some of the bigger failures like Theranos where the product was technologically infeasible from the start. But with at least the three links I have listed - you can probably work out that they were infeasible by just applying common sense. A laser hot enough to easily burn through hair will probably burn your face, tiny artificial gills probably won't be able to keep up with human lungs, and we probably make roads out of tarmac and not glass for a reason. IMO I think you can work out this is far away from a commercial product from similar logic - their prototype looks like something I wouldn't want to stick in my eye, their current battery can't last the day, and existing contact lens manufacturers can't make a comfortable lens that lasts over a month even without stuffing it with electronics.
- iso1631 4y ago
  > I’m just sick of skepticism automatically being associated with intelligence I remember being in the office on April 1st 2004 and seeing the front page of the first edition of the Evening Standard announcing how google were launching an email service to compete with hotmail which allowed upto 1GB of storage (hotmail was something like 2MB at the time). I laughed at how a major newspaper had fallen for what was obviously an april fools joke. A day or two later I reflected that maybe I didn't know everything.
  - Closi 4y ago
    I don't think anyone had doubts about 1GB of storage being technically possible in 2004, the suprise was that they were offering 1GB of email storage for free. 1GB of storage was approx. $1 at the time Gmail was first offered. Whereas I'm sceptical of the technical/practical feasibility here - more like if someone came along and told me they were going to bring consumer-grade jetpacks to the market that people could use for their daily commute I would be sceptical that they could bring that to market successfully for a variety of reasons other than price/commercials (e.g. safety). This is before we even start talking about getting FDA approval for sticking all this stuff into a contact lens (so they will need to presumably prove it doesn't increase the chance of conjunctivitis, corneal abrasions, and eye irritation). IMO it's quite clear from looking at the existing version that it would cause eye irritation - there is a big block sticking out the front.
- jansan 4y ago
  Who are you and why does your opinion matter? What the hell?
ezekiel11 4y ago
Same I think its really skeptical that they have the economies of scale to produce ephemeral contact lenses that gets thrown out after a month. Even an AR glass that looks natural and works well with changing focus is tough to pull off, it's puzzling why they would skip that and go into a almost guaranteed failure. AR contact lenses are still a good 20+ years away and even then it will be hard pressed for adoption because contact lenses aren't very popular and its obvious as to why.
- imron 4y ago
  > AR contact lenses are still a good 20+ years away And it’s things like this that will let us get there in that timeframe.
  - ezekiel11 4y ago
    you can make the same argument for google glasses
    - imron 4y ago
      You can. Google glasses moved the needle a bit but were found lacking. This will build on the lessons of Google glasses and probably also be lacking, and people will keep trying and building on the lessons learnt and in 20 years we may get ubiquitous AR context lenses.
  - Closi 4y ago
    That's not usually how technology development works - usually it's tiny steps in adjacent problems/products which suddenly coalesce into a new product, rather than working for 20 years solidly towards a single product. Take VR as an example - A company that worked on VR since the 80's wouldn't have been unsuccessful, but the reason that the Quest 2 exists today is because of the smartphone, and the smartphone was built on the basis of large flash memory, mobile phones and laptops. Or AirPods, which built on the foundation of over-ear bluetooth headphones and wired earbuds. Bluetooth over-ear headphones obviously built on the foundation of wired over-ear headphones. NB: All of the technologies these built on the shoulders on were stable technologies which were generally received well in the market allowing continued investment in R&D. The closest thing this builds on is Google Glass or Magic Leap, both of which have been a commercial failure and are both a long way off a polished consumer product - and neither of those solve a lot of the technology issues here.
aikinai 4y ago
> Companies can't really make a standard contact lens that lasts more than a month without compromising on comfort and it sliding around your eyeball My mom’s worn the same (hard) contacts for decades.
jotm 4y ago
I'd wear a vibrator up my ass all day if that thing was made for me first instead of the company. The way things are right now, none of these AR/VR/AI/PA products will succeed, and if they do, it will be in a dystopian future.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  If you do decide to wear a vibrator up your ass all day, ButtPlug.io is at least an open source and self hostable platform for it. So that part of it is sorted.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    >self hostable Well, they could hardly wear it up someone else's.
  - jotm 4y ago
    Amazing! :D
gumby 4y ago
I assume the military is the first anticipated customer. Apparently they've been at it for seven years, presumably supported by military R&D contracts.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Spy stuff too

by Closi 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago

They have a functioning prototype. Who are you and why does your opinion matter? (I’m just sick of skepticism automatically being associated with intelligence).

Sebguer 4y ago
I have a pretty cut and dry rule of not putting anything that can catch fire directly on my eyeball.
- bergenty 4y ago
  People said the same thing about LASIK.
  - echelon 4y ago
    LASIK is a one and done operation performed under the careful supervision of a doctor, and it has been tried and tested hundreds of thousands of times. The probability of failure for this device is nonzero and and increases the longer you wear it. The failure modes are potentially disastrous, and there's likely no medical personnel nearby to intervene.
    - birdman3131 4y ago
      Anecdotal but lasik seriously messed with my dads eyesight for over a year. And he drove an OTR truck (at night quite a bit). Had he been aware how bad it was and that it only lasted 10 years or so he said he would have stuck to glasses.
      - LooseMarmoset 4y ago
        I had lasik in 1999. I was legally blind (uncorrected) in my left eye, and needed a pretty serious correction in my right eye. After lasik, my vision was 20/15 (left) and 20/10 (right). Now, in 2022, I still have no need of glasses, although I'd say my vision has degraded somewhat - still good enough to pass the driver exam uncorrected, however. Night vision is objectively worse after lasik. Poorer light sensitivity, and for the first year, I had halos and starbursts around night light sources, especially when my eyes were tired/dry. This improved over time, however. I'd do it all over again if I had to. I couldn't wear contacts anymore, they hurt my eyes, and I got used to navigating like a blind person when I didn't have my glasses, so lasik is a miraculous improvement.
        ckw 4y ago
        When I looked into it a couple years ago, around 1% of procedures resulted in markedly diminished quality of life, with the most extreme cases regularly leading to the suicide of the patient, so I decided against it. Periodically I look back on the decision, and feel a great sense of relief. I count it among the best I have made.
        kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        Corneal flap also also mechanically weakens the eye.
        euroderf 4y ago
        What does it do to your near-in sight though ? Can you read ingredients labels ?
  - Sebguer 4y ago
    Yeah, and the risks of LASIK are widely under-reported!
echelon 4y ago
I'm extremely wary of putting high energy density chemicals into or near my eyes. Not unless there's a medical need or millions of hours of testing on other people first.
nwiswell 4y ago
I'm sympathetic to the skepticism overdose, but ultimately this is a fallacious appeal to authority. GP makes good points. Even the Google/Verily glucose contact lens didn't work out and this is an order of magnitude more complicated. Do we really believe that the deal breaker for Google Glass was just that it made you look like a dork? Because that is the only problem the contact lens seems to solve, and it introduces a whole host of new problems. I'm not sure I feel great about putting a battery straight into my eyeball after seeing what they can do to cars and laptops when they fail.
- bergenty 4y ago
  In my opinion, the contact lenses solve a whole lot of issues. Invisible to people around you, literally captures the entirety of your retina, no motion sickness, higher fidelity and did I mention completely invisible to everyone around you making uptake on this seamless.
  - nwiswell 4y ago
    > Invisible to people around you Not based on the PR photo. It would be very obvious to anyone who makes eye contact with you.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    Ok, let's diligence this, so our skepticism isn't unfounded: >Invisible to people around you. Except for the not-built body-wearable computer that will eventually run the things [0] > literally captures the entirety of your retina This prototype covers <20% of your field of vision [1] >no motion sickness, higher fidelity I think you're comparing this to headsets, but I can tell you from [1] that this is not 'high-fidelity' by any means (for one, it's monochrome and each pixel is binary on or off) Another problem to think about: A sunny day is c. 30k nits. From the looks of the photo, this display is maybe 100 nits. IT will be nearly impossible to see the display outdoors. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVAMRe3kmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVAMRe3kmA - [1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/30/mojo-vision-reveals-the-worlds-smallest-and-densest-micro-display/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/30/mojo-vision-reveals-the-w...
pdpi 4y ago
Whatever tech could make these AR contacts comfortable to wear all day would be worth a fortune for plain old prescription contacts. I’m willing, he’ll I’d be happy and excited, to be proven wrong here, but it seems to me that the balance of probability tips in favour of them having something half-baked and non-viable, and my eyes are definitely too precious to risk them on a bad v1 product
- hinkley 4y ago
  To be fair, AR contact lenses could more easily absorb a $10 premium on a material that is more comfortable for extended wear than regular contact lenses. Yes, it would be good if contacts were more comfortable, but maybe it's a cost problem rather than a lack of capability.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    The contacts are expensive, yes, but for a lot of people (myself included) they could still easily be sold at twice the price if material was more comfortable.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Monthlies are 95% water and dailies are 97% in modern hydrogel lenses. Anything you can build electronics into will be a downgrade from this.
_Adam 4y ago
They have flexible PCB on a contact lens, and an anecdote by the CEO. "Functioning" is too generous.
Closi 4y ago
> They have a functioning prototype. Who are you and why does your opinion matter? I'm allowed to share my opinion on here, it's an internet forum dude. Besides, I don't need a PhD to work out that I don't want to put that thing on my eyeball, or that some of the claims are pretty fantastical compared to the proof given. If they put their prototype on Marques Brownlee or Linus and they said it was good then I would be inclined to believe it. But the CEO being the only wearer and then saying "wowowoww my product is so good this is amazing" isn't too convincing to me. There are plenty of functional prototypes that never become a viable product. This, to me, has the smell of a company that won't be able to bring the product to fruition.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  “I don’t like it”, which is what this comment can be summarized as, is a perfectly valid opinion. But it’s quite different from “the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years” which is pure speculation and dismisses the entire news as.. a lie, I guess?
  - FooHentai 4y ago
    Reducing op's post to your own summary, then attacking that summary, is not making a point in good faith. Besides, it's not pure speculation, it's sitting on very solid foundations of reasoning that were outlined in the earlier post - Current cutting-edge tech for regular contact lenses has resulted in something (silicone hydro-gel) that lasts at best a month before it breaks down, but allows airflow through to the eye which is very important for long-term use and comfort. It's fair to be skeptical about overcoming this issue, which reasonably you would have to do if you're going to layer in some expensive tech and give a user a reasonable lifetime from the product.
  - Closi 4y ago
    > “the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years” which is pure speculation and dismisses the entire news as.. a lie, I guess? We shouldn't take what we read in a PR piece for granted. See: https://swimswam.com/artificial-gills-breath-underwater-like-james-bond/ https://swimswam.com/artificial-gills-breath-underwater-like... https://wccftech.com/skarp-laser-razor/ https://wccftech.com/skarp-laser-razor/ https://greenerideal.com/news/vehicles/0627-solar-powered-roadways/ https://greenerideal.com/news/vehicles/0627-solar-powered-ro... And even some of the bigger failures like Theranos where the product was technologically infeasible from the start. But with at least the three links I have listed - you can probably work out that they were infeasible by just applying common sense. A laser hot enough to easily burn through hair will probably burn your face, tiny artificial gills probably won't be able to keep up with human lungs, and we probably make roads out of tarmac and not glass for a reason. IMO I think you can work out this is far away from a commercial product from similar logic - their prototype looks like something I wouldn't want to stick in my eye, their current battery can't last the day, and existing contact lens manufacturers can't make a comfortable lens that lasts over a month even without stuffing it with electronics.
iso1631 4y ago
> I’m just sick of skepticism automatically being associated with intelligence I remember being in the office on April 1st 2004 and seeing the front page of the first edition of the Evening Standard announcing how google were launching an email service to compete with hotmail which allowed upto 1GB of storage (hotmail was something like 2MB at the time). I laughed at how a major newspaper had fallen for what was obviously an april fools joke. A day or two later I reflected that maybe I didn't know everything.
- Closi 4y ago
  I don't think anyone had doubts about 1GB of storage being technically possible in 2004, the suprise was that they were offering 1GB of email storage for free. 1GB of storage was approx. $1 at the time Gmail was first offered. Whereas I'm sceptical of the technical/practical feasibility here - more like if someone came along and told me they were going to bring consumer-grade jetpacks to the market that people could use for their daily commute I would be sceptical that they could bring that to market successfully for a variety of reasons other than price/commercials (e.g. safety). This is before we even start talking about getting FDA approval for sticking all this stuff into a contact lens (so they will need to presumably prove it doesn't increase the chance of conjunctivitis, corneal abrasions, and eye irritation). IMO it's quite clear from looking at the existing version that it would cause eye irritation - there is a big block sticking out the front.
jansan 4y ago
Who are you and why does your opinion matter? What the hell?

ezekiel11 4y ago

Same I think its really skeptical that they have the economies of scale to produce ephemeral contact lenses that gets thrown out after a month. Even an AR glass that looks natural and works well with changing focus is tough to pull off, it's puzzling why they would skip that and go into a almost guaranteed failure. AR contact lenses are still a good 20+ years away and even then it will be hard pressed for adoption because contact lenses aren't very popular and its obvious as to why.

imron 4y ago
> AR contact lenses are still a good 20+ years away And it’s things like this that will let us get there in that timeframe.
- ezekiel11 4y ago
  you can make the same argument for google glasses
  - imron 4y ago
    You can. Google glasses moved the needle a bit but were found lacking. This will build on the lessons of Google glasses and probably also be lacking, and people will keep trying and building on the lessons learnt and in 20 years we may get ubiquitous AR context lenses.
- Closi 4y ago
  That's not usually how technology development works - usually it's tiny steps in adjacent problems/products which suddenly coalesce into a new product, rather than working for 20 years solidly towards a single product. Take VR as an example - A company that worked on VR since the 80's wouldn't have been unsuccessful, but the reason that the Quest 2 exists today is because of the smartphone, and the smartphone was built on the basis of large flash memory, mobile phones and laptops. Or AirPods, which built on the foundation of over-ear bluetooth headphones and wired earbuds. Bluetooth over-ear headphones obviously built on the foundation of wired over-ear headphones. NB: All of the technologies these built on the shoulders on were stable technologies which were generally received well in the market allowing continued investment in R&D. The closest thing this builds on is Google Glass or Magic Leap, both of which have been a commercial failure and are both a long way off a polished consumer product - and neither of those solve a lot of the technology issues here.

aikinai 4y ago

> Companies can't really make a standard contact lens that lasts more than a month without compromising on comfort and it sliding around your eyeball My mom’s worn the same (hard) contacts for decades.

jotm 4y ago

I'd wear a vibrator up my ass all day if that thing was made for me first instead of the company. The way things are right now, none of these AR/VR/AI/PA products will succeed, and if they do, it will be in a dystopian future.

vorpalhex 4y ago
If you do decide to wear a vibrator up your ass all day, ButtPlug.io is at least an open source and self hostable platform for it. So that part of it is sorted.
- thfuran 4y ago
  >self hostable Well, they could hardly wear it up someone else's.
- jotm 4y ago
  Amazing! :D

gumby 4y ago

I assume the military is the first anticipated customer. Apparently they've been at it for seven years, presumably supported by military R&D contracts.

euroderf 4y ago
Spy stuff too