Forget Google Glass. Forget that gaudy VR headset. Imagine the benefits of internet connectivity and visual information not on-screen, but on-eye. Enter the new wave of augmented reality devices: The contact lens.
I am reminded of virtually every cyborg movie from robocop to the terminator. There’s always that scene as seen through the eyes of the cyborg. Information about everything they see is streaming across their field of vision. Faces recognized to produce a name, targeting for the shot and looking at a bomb and instantly getting instructions across their visual field on how to disarm it. Iron man has Jarvis…we could have him, too, in the not so distant future.
While our work may not be quite as important as targeting terrorists or disarming a bomb, we could certainly benefit from facial recognition and appointment reminders. GPS, finding addresses, and calling home could all happen in our personal field of vision very soon.
In fact, Samsung has already filed a patent on ‘smart’ contact lenses, that can actually project images straight into the users’ eyes. Wearing the lenses would allow people to experience augmented reality, with computer-generated images superimposed over the real world.
Google has filed a similar patent. Despite halting the sales of Google Glass, they are not abandoning its research for the moment. And with good reason. Any of the software designed for Google Glass could have potential use in a ‘smart lens.’ So until the technology is perfected for commercial use, at least Google has a medium to forge ahead with software.
Don’t despair, your cell phone isnt a dinosaur yet. The proposed patents connect the lenses to your phone. The components in the lens dont have the computing power required so they will have to piggyback on your cellphone processor. As soon as the processor size issue is overcome, however, theres still one more hurdle to jump before we ditch the cell phones for good. Audio.
Controlling the contact lenses through eye movement and blinking is the current proposed method, but that seems clunky. There are obviously a few issues yet to work out but those obstacles aren’t insurmountable.
Considering the long experimental run for Google Glass without a solid and viably sustainable release, we may not be able to expect the Samsung patent to turn into a reality anytime soon, but the contact lens might just be the perfect platform for those that arent quite ready for surgical implementation of technology – you could just remove them from your eyes. However, it very possibly could be the gateway to a more accepting public, a population that begins to turn its way of thinking and is wholly more open to the field of biological electronics than it is today.
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M. Sang
FTM Journalist
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FutureTechMag 