It will be interesting to see if they are able to progressively scale up the resolution while still ensuring that you can actually see out of the lens.<p>As cool as this is, though, I'm more interested in having them figure out more ways of restoring vision rather than augmenting it. For purely selfish reasons, I'm especially interested in retina replacement, which is being worked on (they've been able to create new retinas using embryonic stem cells), but I haven't heard of any studies having started yet to actually swap out damaged retinas with the new ones.
I'm still waiting for easily affordable "Virtual Retinal Displays" (using a laser focused on the retina) to be available:<p>(<a href="http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/</a>)
I want one with facial recognition software. Never have that nervous moment again when you have to do introductions and you are just not quite so sure about your old acquaintances name.
Interestingly enough, I think a technology like this has to be monitored by professional sports--maybe not now, but I could see this type of technology being the new frontier in "cheating". It seems like the logical next step in performance enhancement. Imagine a display that could read the velocity of a fastball, measure the drop of a sinker, read a quarterbacks heart rate, or judge which receiver is the most open. A lot of players in professional sports already deal with technologically advanced contacts, though these are quite rudimentary and merely change the tint (Yellow and Red) to allow for athletes to see specific details much more clearly.
As interesting as this is, I don't think embedding all this into a contact lens is t he way to go. This is purely hypothetical but how about something like this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg</a> (SixthSense) done with a sort of polarity/light effect that could only be seen though a special contact lens.
How do you either keep them turned "upright" or detect rotation for updating the images? Contacts slide around in the eye a bit and their shape keeps them on the eye's lens pretty well, but there's no asymmetrical shape for keep the contact lens from rotating.
Wirelessly powering something that sits in my eye? I don't think so. Isn't it about 10,000 times easier and safer to do a HUD using glasses than contacts?
this: <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision_pr.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision_pr.html</a> is just too good to not mention here