Current efforts to develop an LED contact lens that projects screen images directly onto your eye are closer to reality than ever before. Imagine, it’s three days before Christmas and you have been stuck at the airport waiting on a flight home for two hours. You glance up at the giant screen of arrivals and departures. Fantastic, your flight has just been pushed back another three hours. It’s hot, it’s cramped and you cannot spend one more minute flinging birds at a wall. Perhaps what you need is bionic vision.
Alongside a vast array of colorful and creative non-prescription contact lenses, researchers at the University of Washington are about raise the bar for designer lens wearers and tech junkies the world over. In addition to watches, Christmas lights and flashlights, LED bulbs can now be found inside the prototype for a new standard in contact lenses.
Augmented Vision
The research for this technology is led by Dr. Babak Amir Parviz, who received his graduate degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan. His research in nanotechnology has led him to develop a prototypical LED contact lens that contains embedded circuitry and red and blue LED lights that would enable the wearer to see directions, read text messages, or even watch a movie without ever glancing at a computer screen or a smartphone. The images would display themselves directly on your eyeball, giving new rise to the term “all-seeing eye.” One of the biggest boons to this type of discovery is that it makes access to information truly hands free, a problem that has plagued any automobile driver who also knows how to send and receive text messages.
In addition to sending and receiving data from their own Wi-Fi connection, the LED lenses also have the potential to come equipped with camera-esque features, including zoom capabilities, for those who enjoy spying, star-gazing, and nature walks. These LED super-lenses would be worn in the same manner as your more traditional contact lenses; inserted and removed the very same way.
Roadblocks
Circuitry and inorganic compounds in your eye … what could possibly go wrong? Horrifying scenarios worthy of the SyFy channel aside, Dr. Parviz and his team are working diligently to identify and correct such issues with augmented vision long before they become a real-life problem. Thus far, the LED contact lenses have been tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes at a time with no adverse side effects.
In 2009, IEEE Spectrum interviewed Dr. Parviz regarding his research on the LED contact lenses up to that point. In the article Dr. Parviz states, “Three fundamental challenges stand in the way of building a multipurpose contact lens. First, the processes for making many of the lens’s parts and subsystems are incompatible with one another and with the fragile polymer of the lens. To get around this problem, my colleagues and I make all our devices from scratch. To fabricate the components for silicon circuits and LEDs, we use high temperatures and corrosive chemicals, which means we can’t manufacture them directly onto a lens. That leads to the second challenge, which is that all the key components of the lens need to be miniaturized and integrated onto about 1.5 square centimeters of a flexible, transparent polymer. We haven’t fully solved that problem yet, but we have so far developed our own specialized assembly process, which enables us to integrate several different kinds of components onto a lens. Last but not least, the whole contraption needs to be completely safe for the eye. Take an LED, for example. Most red LEDs are made of aluminum gallium arsenide, which is toxic. So before an LED can go into the eye, it must be enveloped in a biocompatible substance.”
Medical conditions that result in seizures, such as epilepsy, are a concern of augmented vision of course. So is the corneal burnout that will ensue should you choose to rely solely on LED vision. As with most of our technological advancements, bionic vision in meant to enhance what is already there and add a measure of convenience. It is in no way designed to become a permanent replacement for what you already have.
Where Do I Sign?
It’s exciting, I know. While these LED contacts conjure up images of the Terminator, Repo: The Genetic Opera, and Harry Potter's Mad-Eye Moody, they are not being offered in your optometrist’s office anytime soon, and smartphones and laptops are still a long way from being obsolete. Mail Online, a UK-based newspaper, reports that researchers are simultaneously working on ways in which these lenses would be able to aid the vision impaired, and even help those with diabetes measure their blood glucose levels. Scientists are also still trying to develop miniature green LEDs so that the wearer will be able to get a full color image.
These futuristic LED lenses are still very much in the experimental phase and by the time the product is actually marketable, who knows what changes and advancements will have been made in augmented vision? We will just have to wait and see.
Dawn Koogle - Dawn has an extensive writing portfolio. She has worked on numerous writing projects ranging from headlining news stories to children's ...
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