A wearable bionic contact lens that can stream hands-free information directly to our eyes. Did you see this coming? Researchers at the University of Washington demonstrated the safety of a prototype device tested in the eye of a rabbit in a paper (‘A single-pixel wireless contact lens display’.) The researchers’ findings were also published on November 22 in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, writes Sally James in UW Today.
Building the lenses required researchers to make circuits from metal only a few nanometers thick (which is about one-thousandth of a human hair). They built light-emitting diodes (LED) one-third of a millimeter in diameter. The researchers also made arrays of tiny lenses that were put into the contacts to help focus the images. The contact lens has an antenna to take power from an external source, as well as an integrated circuit to store energy and transfer it to a transparent sapphire chip containing a single blue LED.
The UW researchers collaborated with a group at Aalto University in Finland for the project.
Now we wait for the rest of Terminator gear to be developed, and a couple of world-changing events..
(Image Courtesy: UW Today)