Augmented Reality Contacts
We’ve seen them in movies and read about them in books, but never did we think we’d actually be able to create contact lenses that create an augmented reality.
Babak Parviz and his students at the University of Washington are attempting to create a contact lens with a electronic LED that is able to pair wirelessly. Within these contact lenses, they are trying to embed control and communication circuits, and miniscule antennas that can eventually display hundreds of LEDs and form images, words and charts in front of your very eye – literally.
And for the purpose of not disorientating the wearer, even most of the hardware is semi-transparent. How cool is that?
The idea behind these lenses is to enhance every day experiences with visual information. With essentially a computer on your eye, you can easily and effortlessly translate a foreign language into captions, find directions with a blink, or pull up an email.
Along with being your own incredibly near and dear vision controlled computer, they are hoping to use these lenses as a way to monitor the wearer’s health as well. With several simple sensors in place, you could easily detect the breakdown of the wearer’s tears and detect things such a blood sugar levels. They could even monitor cholesterol, sodium, and potassium levels and relay information directly to your doctor if an emergency arises.
These contact lenses are still in developmental phases and do not fully exist to the extent student of University of Washington have imagined them yet, how cool is that this might be possible?
An entire world at the blink of an eye.
