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The Display of the Future Might Be in Your Contact Lens

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:27PM   
from the never-miss-a-tweet dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

A glance to the left. A flick to the right. As my eyes flitted around the room, I moved through a virtual interface only visible to me—scrolling through a calendar, looking up commute times home, and even controlling music playback. It's all I theoretically need to do to use Mojo Lens, a smart contact lens coming from a company called Mojo Vision.

The California-based company, which has been quiet about what it's been working on for five years, has finally shared its plan for the world's "first true smart contact lens." But let's be clear: This is not a product you'll see on store shelves next autumn. It's in the research and development phase—a few years away from becoming a real product. In fact, the demos I tried did not even involve me plopping on a contact lens—they used virtual reality headsets and held up bulky prototypes to my eye, as though I was Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/mojo-vision-smart-contact-lens/

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Original Submission

• Re:Meh (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 22 2020, @10:19AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday January 22 2020, @10:19AM (#946773) Journal

  I don't think eye tracking from a contact lens is conceptually hard. If anything, it's easier than with a headset: you already have to scan the environment and move things depending on the orientation of the camera, you effectively get eye tracking for free when the camera is moving in sync with the eye. There are a bunch of hard problems to make this not vapour:

  • Making a screen small enough to put on a lens, powered by something that fits in the eye.
  • Making a contact lens that users can put in and take out without cleaning problems or, alternatively, one that can be left in for a month and then easily cleaned (my non-computerised ones are left in for a month, but then thrown away: I'd hate to throw away a complex bit of miniaturised electronics). Cleaning is a faff for normal contact lenses, how would it work for these?
  • Making a camera small enough that it can fit in (ideally the rim of) a contact lens, powered by something that fits in the eye.
  • A sufficiently high-bandwidth communication channel with something in your eye that you can do the rendering elsewhere (I do not want a GPU on my eyeball!) and transmit images there and get camera data back.
  • Achieving a much higher frame rate than current displays (potentially at a lower resolution). Your eye darts all over the place to give you a static picture so takes the equivalent of many frames of captures for every frame you display on a screen. If the screen is on the eye then you'd need to update the display whenever the eye moves a tiny amount.

  Honestly, if you can make a display and camera that small and light then you could make a really nice pair of AR glasses and they'd probably be more convenient. The contact lens option only sounds useful if you can go the implanted contact lens route and have them permanently in your eye, though that still leaves the problem of how you communicate between the display and the GPU.

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  sudo mod me up

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