Contact lenses will project images directly onto your eyeballs

[Michael Schrengohst]

Contact lenses will project images directly onto your eyeballs

http://dvice.com/archives/2011/01/contact-lenses.php

All those 3DTVs and virtual reality goggles are soon to be rendered obsolete by contact lenses with built-in LED arrays that can display images on top of your retinas, whether you want them to or not.

Researchers at the University of Washington have been working on extremely tiny and semi-transparent LEDs designed to be integrated into contact lenses. So far, they've managed to create red pixels and blue pixels, and when they can figure out green ones, they'll be able to make full color displays.

Despite being millimeters from your retinas, the images created by the lenses will be in perfect focus, and when the display is turned off, everything will be transparent. Since the lenses are inside your eyelids, though, you can't un-see anything that they decide to project, which is something that you'll have to consider when you're watching something especially scary or gross on them. Power will come from a beltpack that transmits electricity wirelessly to a resonating antenna in the lens itself, and data will be transmitted the same way so that you don't have to plug HDMI cables into your eye sockets.

In the meantime, we've already got eyeball-mounted wireless sensors for detecting things like blood glucose levels, so it's really just a matter of time before LEDs and their associated electronics get small enough and cheap enough that we can all afford to be enjoying visual overlays of stupid YouTube videos 24/7.

 

[Curran Giddens]

Kind of cool and creepy at the same time. New Gitmo torture technique?

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Interesting..

 

[BigLu]

OUCH!

 

[Joe Kleber]

It was only a matter of time. Now, how many years till 4k contacts?

 

[Anson Fogel]

How do you deal with the fact that (my) contacts rotate somewhat - they are not in a fixed position as far as rotational angle, and they move around a hair on my eyeballs as well.

 

[Joe Kleber]

You make the pixel array round and you program the orientation of the active pixels to always remain upright. :willy_nilly:

 

[Greg Huson]

How do you deal with the fact that (my) contacts rotate somewhat - they are not in a fixed position as far as rotational angle, and they move around a hair on my eyeballs as well.

Toric lenses are weighted so they can correct for astigmatism. While they don't stay exactly centered on every blink, they do right themselves pretty quickly. My guess is your brain would adapt pretty quickly - but could be freaky weird in 3D.

Of course, the next step is ICL monitors... implanted lenses don't rotate at all. When the DP closes his eyes, he's not imagining the shot... he's watching the dailies...

 

[Jeff Coatney]

Makes that contraption in Clockwork Orange obsolete.

 

[Julio Quintana]

My eyes are too important for my chosen profession. It will be a LONG time before I put an electronic device in my eye balls...

 

[Curran Giddens]

Makes that contraption in Clockwork Orange obsolete.

Exactly what I was thinking.... They already tortured detainees for weeks at a time with non-stop ridiculously loud crappy music. Now they will be forcing them to watch episodes of "Barney & Friends" over and over.