July 7, 2008

Could We Put A TV In A Contact Lens?

contactlens460(2).jpg As a wearer of contact lenses and a person that has a wild imagination I've often wondered what it would be like to have some type of display in the lens sitting on my eye. Sitting on the bus home from work, I could just sit there, tune out, and watch a movie and no one would know the difference. An engineering professor at the University of Washington named Babak Parviz is doing just that, embedding electrical circuits on a contact lens and now working on adding LEDs. If he's successful in adding the LEDs, he'll have created the tiniest "personal display" in history.

There are some tough problems to overcome though. First off, the tiny display has to be powered some way. Second off, your eye can't actually focus on something that close so light rays have to be manipulated by the lens itself to enable you to see a clear picture. Plus Parviz has to make sure that the electronics making up his invention don't do any harm to the eye. The engineer behind this feat has his detractors too, but in the future we'll keep our eye on Parviz because who wouldn't want a little TV basically embedded in their eyeball.

Via The Guardian