Electronic Contact Lens promises bionic capabilities for everyone

It’s not often in this era of rampant technological innovation that a fundamentally new concept surfaces – with almost no limitations to what can be achieved with the myriad new technologies coming to market over the last few years, fundamentally new ideas of this magnitude are becoming increasingly rare, much less technologies with groundbreaking societal implications. Such a technology emerged this week when it was announced that engineers at the University of Washington have used microscopic scale manufacturing techniques to combine a flexible contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

Though in its infancy, the combination of a wearable contact lens with embedded optoelectronic and electronic devices promises many things, most notably this could well be the beginning of the Computer Human Interface of the future.

The trend towards miniaturization of computers has now reached a roadblock due to our inability to adequately display the information they provide on smaller screens – the main limiting factor in relation to the ever-shrinking size of computers and telephones has become the size of the display – if it gets any smaller, we can’t read it.

Currently, the most obvious solutions for further reduction in size of wearable computer-based devices are miniature projectors and externally worn heads up displays.

The amount of investment in miniaturized projector technologies bears testimony to the prospects for this market and we have seen numerous prototypes showcased recently by the likes of Microvision, 3M, Texas Instruments, Explay, Neochroma, Digislide, Light Blue Optics and from research labs such as the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems . Though the microprojection area promises the ability to project a large screen on any flat surface, we have yet to see commercially available products and the technology won’t suit everyone, partially because they’re still not quite small enough, and partially because of privacy issues – projecting delicate company information onto an airport terminal wall, for example, might not be a good idea.

Similarly, those heads up displays that have come to market are either prohibitively expensive or do not yet offer high resolution screens of sufficient clarity and stability to avoid the attendant migraine headaches. The promise is there for the near future, but one of the major drawbacks to mass adoption of these products is that not everybody wishes to look like a cyborg.

Accordingly, the University of Washington’s contact lens offers the promise of a viable large screen display alternative for connecting users with their mobile devices. Project head and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Babak Parviz envisages that his team’s electronic contact lens will offer the ability to superimpose a transparent high resolution display over the field of vision of one, maybe both eyes of the wearer .

"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," says Parviz.

Apart from the expectation of eventually offering a large screen display for our wearable and micro computers, PDAs and phones, the heads-up aspect of the contact lens leaves the way open for a democratization of Augmented Reality.

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