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Electronic contact lens displays pixels on the eyes
- Egregore 15y agoIt's an interesting development, but unfortunately not tested on humans yet. So we don't know yet the real resolution for human eye.
- exDM69 15y agoDid anyone else think about the Eyephone episode of Futurama when they saw this?
- arethuza 15y agoNo - I thought about the augmented realities in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
- rasur 15y agoI thought of Steve Mann's "eye tap"
- polyfractal 15y agoWas just about to post the same thing. Pretty nifty device, I've considered building my own for a while now. It's pretty simple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeTap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeTap
- rasur 15y agoYeah, I like the wearable computing idea much more than I like walking about with a "smart" phone.
- viraptor 15y agoGhost in the shell and vision interception devices. Hopefully the devices these guys create don't come with an integrated killswitch.
- starwed 15y agoI actually thought about the contact lenses in Torchwood that could overlay text on your vision.
- switz 15y agoA high resolution OLED screen built into my eye? Screw IMAX.
- tribeofone 15y agoAs interesting as this is, I don't think embedding all this into a contact lens is t he way to go. This is purely hypothetical but how about something like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg (SixthSense) done with a sort of polarity/light effect that could only be seen though a special contact lens.
- tallanvor 15y agoIt will be interesting to see if they are able to progressively scale up the resolution while still ensuring that you can actually see out of the lens. As cool as this is, though, I'm more interested in having them figure out more ways of restoring vision rather than augmenting it. For purely selfish reasons, I'm especially interested in retina replacement, which is being worked on (they've been able to create new retinas using embryonic stem cells), but I haven't heard of any studies having started yet to actually swap out damaged retinas with the new ones.
- palish 15y agoHow were your retinas damaged, if I may ask?
- tallanvor 15y agoLuckily it was only a single retina that was damaged, and it was due to a parasite when I was under a year old, so I've never actually known what it was like to have two good eyes. You can get by with only one eye, but you don't have any real depth perception and you don't get any benefits from 3D movies (although you still get all the downsides). Plus, although I would love to try laser surgery to improve my vision in my remaining "good" eye (if you can call needing -9.5 power lenses good), the risks are still too high given the consequences if something went wrong.
- generalk 15y agoI'm in the same boat; different circumstances but I've only got one functioning eye and the other one isn't fantastic. (-14 contact lens.) I often wonder if there isn't more I could be doing -- hanging out near research hospitals that have good retina teams, following research, anything -- to keep abreast of new developments or maybe even get in on some trials for new procedures.
- tallanvor 15y agoIt's actually sort of interesting how much the field of eye care has improved in my lifetime: I was a year and half when I had surgery to shorten one of the muscles for my bad eye - they thought it was just a lazy eye. When I was 5 I used to have to wear a patch over my good eye for an hour a day because the doctors still thought my other eye was just lazy and that I could be "trained" to use it properly. At 6 we traveled 4 hours to Seattle to see an eye specialist at a hospital. It was a full day affair and I had to spend most of the day in a dimly lit playroom because my eyes were kept dilated so they could take multiple pictures. This is when they actually figured out that there was more going on, and decided what parasite actually caused the damage (I still can't remember the name of it). 15 years ago I went to an eye doctor who took another picture of my eye. He wanted to show the image to others because he had never seen anything like it. Even 5 years ago pictures of the eye usually meant dilating it and putting in a dye so they could get a clear image. Today I can go get an eye exam and they don't even need to put dye in my eye to take a picture. --Other tests still need the dye, but at least I haven't had to have my eyes dilated for around 3 years. And, of course, the images are stored online so they can quickly load them up and compare them to make sure nothing has changed. If this sort of progress continues, I figure there's a chance that they'll come up with something that can give me vision in both eyes before I'm too old for it to matter. :)
- jasonabelli 15y agoI want one with facial recognition software. Never have that nervous moment again when you have to do introductions and you are just not quite so sure about your old acquaintances name.
- patrickod 15y agoThat but with nice metadata associated with them. Imagine Rapportive in real life. That would be incredibly useful.
- mike-cardwell 15y agoI look forward to the day when my enemies leave an unattended Facebook session open, and I can update their status so they have a big "I'm carrying five grand in my wallet right now" sign floating above their heads as they walk around dark alleyways.
- DilipJ 15y agoI know that was in jest (if not, you may be turning into a supervillian), but the actual implications of having facial recognition built into contacts is immense. It will be a Minority Report type world, where anonymity would be completely gone. I guess it would mean no criminal outlaws or parole violators walking around, but for a common man to not be able to walk anywhere without everyone around him knowing everything there is to know about him....that's scary
- pavel_lishin 15y agoI imagine that sharing facial-recognition data will be protected by new laws - although, of course, it won't work. Perhaps we'll start seeing new fashions arise as a result: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/03/cv-dazzle/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/03/cv-dazzle/
- DilipJ 15y ago
- dfischer 15y agoShow me the best ratio to winning when playing Blackjack. WIN!
- delinka 15y agoGeez - this will spawn a whole new area of detection in casino security systems. High resolution cameras capable of seeing the subtle reflective changes in the eyeball, EM detectors at the doors for finding the minuscule circuits on your eyes ... I can also see the casinos' utopia coming to fruition: those without the smarts to count cards, without the expertise to play properly, without all their electronics gadgets, coming to play^W empty their wallets into buckets owned by the casinos.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoHow is that significantly different from the casinos' status quo?
- DanBC 15y agoI'm still waiting for easily affordable "Virtual Retinal Displays" (using a laser focused on the retina) to be available: (http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/ http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/)
- pavel_lishin 15y agoI'm waiting for the inevitable news stories that will follow - "Could hackers hijack your VRD to fry your eyes with lasers? Tune in at 11."
- meatsock 15y agothread title incorrect, should be 'displays pixel'
- leviathan 15y agoThat sound you hear is the sound thousands of advertisers creaming their pants. Now you will have to look at that ad, even if you close your eyes.
- billybob 15y agoNot if the software is open source. On the contrary, you could run Adblock and never see another billboard.
- hcal 15y agoI am struck by the brilliance of this idea.
- sixtofour 15y agoWhy would you think this could ever be open source. It will be expensive to develop, and no corporation will spend the money to do so and then open source the software. It may (not likely) be jail breakable, but you still have to pay (probably) thousands to get it. I was thinking one way for people to afford them would be to accept ads. I would hate that, and I think I'd just wear glasses or normal contacts. In fact I'd be much more attracted to this sort of thing in glasses, because they'd likely be cheaper, and glasses can probably support more functions. And you wouldn't have a radio receiver concentrating radio energy directly on your eyes.
- jerf 15y agoHardware isn't software. I run open source on my hardware, but my hardware isn't open source. If your logic held, open source wouldn't be possible.
- sixtofour 15y agoSometimes open source on locked down and jailbroken hardware is better. Sometimes it bricks the hardware. I wonder what it's like to have a brick in the eye? Also this is a thing that goes in your body, and the FDA might have something to say about open source in that context. Is there any open source software running on pacemakers at the moment? I think there are many more issues involved than simply "it's my hardware and I'll do what I want with it." If we get better eyeware through open source then great, but I'm skeptical at the moment that it can, much less will happen.
- billybob 15y agoWirelessly powering something that sits in my eye? I don't think so. Isn't it about 10,000 times easier and safer to do a HUD using glasses than contacts?
- Cushman 15y agoAt these scales? Probably not.
- dholowiski 15y agoFrom the article: "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. " I'm a pretty rational person and I have no problem holding a cell phone up to my head, but this scares me.
- CamperBob 15y agoIt shouldn't scare you. They'll be using milliwatts of RF, nowhere near enough to heat your lenses.
- wcoenen 15y agoWhy? It would probably be a much weaker signal than that of a cellphone (~500 milliwatts). Assuming the tech is similar to short-range RFID, it could run on a transmission power of a few milliwatts.
- delinka 15y agoHow do you either keep them turned "upright" or detect rotation for updating the images? Contacts slide around in the eye a bit and their shape keeps them on the eye's lens pretty well, but there's no asymmetrical shape for keep the contact lens from rotating.
- cstuder 15y agoSome lenses, I think mostly the soft ones, are asymmetrical: They are intentionally heavier on the bottom and let gravity rotate them into place.
- gmac 15y agoYes -- those are toric lenses, for correcting astigmatism. Unfortunately it makes them rather thicker and less comfortable than the usual ones.
- mietek 15y agoFunnily enough, I just picked up today my first ever daily disposable lenses for correcting astigmatism. These are the most comfortable lenses I've ever worn, including regular daily disposables.
- jessriedel 15y agoStill, there is going to be a significant amount of shake and sway as you move your eyes around. I wonder if you could correct it in software by tracking the movement of the lens with respect to the eye.
- sireat 15y agoFirst thing that came to my mind, was Neuromancer where the implanted mirrorshades in Molly's eyes showed time.
- signa11 15y agothis: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision_pr.html is just too good to not mention here
- inty 15y agoInterestingly enough, I think a technology like this has to be monitored by professional sports--maybe not now, but I could see this type of technology being the new frontier in "cheating". It seems like the logical next step in performance enhancement. Imagine a display that could read the velocity of a fastball, measure the drop of a sinker, read a quarterbacks heart rate, or judge which receiver is the most open. A lot of players in professional sports already deal with technologically advanced contacts, though these are quite rudimentary and merely change the tint (Yellow and Red) to allow for athletes to see specific details much more clearly.
- JeffL 15y agoIf everyone has access to these, then maybe it just makes the sports more exciting and enjoyable for all the players and fans to have extra information?
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoAutomatic photogrey eyes! Telescopic vision! Zoom!