For the first time, a human subject’s eye was fitted with an augmented reality (AR) contact lens. AR contact lenses present enormous engineering hurdles, the most challenging of which is figuring out how to power these tiny devices. Mojo Vision is a company that has done just that.
These are no normal contact lenses, this piece of hardware could be a game changer and may put Google Glass to shame when it’s perfected. Mojo Vision’s contact lens technology without a doubt has the attention of Silicon Valley and can only go up from here.
One day, we’ll look back and laugh at the days when people walked down the street with their necks bowed, peering down at small screens in their hands as an outrageously primitive method to connect with information.
So what are virtual reality contact lenses? Let’s take a look.
Where It All Started
The first set of human participants engaged with a mixed reality of real and virtual objects three decades ago. They accomplished this by climbing into a massive upper-body exoskeleton, placing their faces against a vision system suspended from the ceiling, and manually completing tasks that needed them to interact with both physical and simulated items.
They were putting the Virtual Fixtures platform, a prototype augmented reality system, through its paces at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The apparatus took up half a room and cost about $1 million in digital displays, but it worked, demonstrating for the first time that augmented reality might improve human performance in real-world tasks.
The first realistic test of an augmented reality contact lens was completed not too long back, marking an important new milestone in the field of AR and demonstrating how far the technology has progressed over the last 30 years. The experiment was carried out in a research lab at Mojo Vision in Saratoga, California.
No, it wasn’t a sloppy bench test of big gear with dangling wires. For the first time, a true test of an AR contact lens was worn directly on the eye of a human subject.
The Contact Lens Out of Science Fiction
Creating a wearable augmented reality contact lens is a huge engineering problem. People generally ask about display technology when this comes up. Sure, putting a high-resolution display on a tiny clear lens is tricky, but it’s hardly the most difficult part of the issue.
The more difficult challenge is that this tiny lens, which must fit comfortably on the human eye, must connect wirelessly with other devices and be completely powered without any form of physical tie. That is a difficult undertaking, but Mojo Vision accomplished it in their most recent presentation.
The prototype lens, according to Mojo Vision, features medical-grade micro-batteries. The current prototype’s battery life is unknown, but the company’s product aim is power management that allows for all-day wear.
Naturally, their display technology is remarkable as well. The Mojo Lens has a 14,000 pixel-per-inch MicroLED display with a pixel pitch (the distance between adjacent pixels) of 1.8 microns, according to the firm. In comparison, an iPhone 13 with a Super Retina XDR Display has a resolution of 460 pixels per inch. In other words, the pixel density of the Mojo Lens hardware is almost 30 times that of a modern iPhone.
These lenses also have an ARM CPU with a 5GHz radio transmitter, as well as an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer for tracking eye movements. And all of this is visible to the naked eye.
Mobile Devices Might Be Old News
It will take many years of research to get from today’s prototypes to mass-market consumer items that deliver immersive AR capabilities to people all over the world. Experts believe that augmented reality eyewear, first as glasses and later as contacts, will eventually replace the smartphone as our primary interface with digital content. In addition, it’s believed that augmented reality will fundamentally alter our connection with information, converting digital content from discrete artifacts that we access selectively into seamless aspects of our actual world.
Enter The Smart Contact Lens
Mojo vision is really pushing the boundaries with this piece of technology. Up until now, the idea of smart contact lenses that are basically a digital teleprompter on your eye would be something in a science fiction movie. Yet, a functional prototype is here, with a power source about the same size as a grain of sand and with the potential to replace smart glasses entirely.
We really do live in one of the best periods of time. These smart contact lenses don’t support VR, so an immersive experience with this smart technology isn’t in the book yet. However, it’s still got a way to go and who knows, maybe when there’s a finished product released we may have access to the most cutting-edge external device out there.
In the future, we’ll probably be using contact lens technology that gives us real-time information on the current weather, gives us infrared vision and adjusts lighting levels. It goes without saying that piece of hardware could be a great advantage to a lot of real people out there in the years to come.
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