Since they first appeared, at the end of the 19th century, contact lenses have brought forth a new age in treating diseases of the eye, eliminating the need for glasses, and hiding the handicap from prying eyes. Over the past decades, the production process related to these lenses has also evolved spectacularly, and even healthy people began wearing them, as fashion accessories, or for other uses than vision improvement. Now, with the advent of nanotechnology and advanced electronics, a new revolution in contact lenses may be at hand.
Scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle (UWS), led by Babak Parviz, recently came up with a new idea, to include minuscule electronics in new generations of the lenses, and thus create an entirely new type of Heads-Up Display (HUD), similar to the ones used on car windshields and airplane cockpits. The electric lens would function by harvesting radio frequencies from the environment for energy, and then transferring that power to a light-emitting diode (LED), embedded in the glass or plastic itself. The diode would then be used to project images directly into the eye of the wearer, without thus being visible from the outside.
“Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 centimeters to 1 meter away,” Pa… (read more)
