Augmented Reality Contact Lenses

Babak Parviz has written a fascinating overview of the challenges and promises of creating contact lenses with augmented reality features — think contact lenses driven by a portable device that effectively add a computer-generated overlay to the real world.

Parviz knows of what he speaks as the University of Washington professor and his students are already building one-off custom lenses that incorporate a single LED powered wirelessly by RF.

These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

Parviz also notes such contact lenses could be used to gather health and other information such as, for example, glucose levels for diabetics.

Parviz nicely lays out both the possibilities such a device would hold, but also the very real challenges in building one, especially since many of the substances that are routinely used in electronic devices are toxic, which starts to become a problem when you’re talking about putting them in nearly direct contact with the eye.

Personally, I’m hoping I live long enough to see something like this become common, though if texting and driving is a major problem, imagine what that will be when you can have YouTube streamed directly to the surface of your eye.