Electronic Contact Lens promises bionic capabilities for everyone

“We had a few things in mind. The first was that we could display some information – the level of the sophistication of the display would obviously be dependent on the sophistication of the technology we used. At its simplest, it might just be a single pixel that switched on and off and indicated something that’s important to the user. Going several levels beyond that, it might be a high resolution display.”

“There are a variety of applications in that domain once you have a reasonable degree of resolution in a display, such as augmented reality and computer generated images that you could superimpose over the outside world.”

“Going beyond that, we could incorporate all sorts of optical devices on a contact lens. Obviously it needs to be remotely powered and it would communicate with outside devices via a wireless link.”

“A fully functional high resolution display is still some way off,” he says, explaining that the existing prototype lens contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, and have been tested on rabbits with no adverse effects.

“Our immediate goal is to have a display that has only a few pixels to demonstrate the viability of the concept and after that we will work upwards towards increasing the resolution of the display but it will be some time yet before we have a fully functional hires display.”

"This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising."

“So those are all doable things that are on our agenda”, says Parviz, referring to the array of technological possibilities mentioned elsewhere in this article, “but they’re not easy to implement so they’re all in the future still.”

“What’s interesting and encouraging is that a lot of these things have already been demonstrated independently so there are lots of different micro-lens designs already.”

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