Bionic eyes er, contacts
January 21st, 2008 | by rey |Imagine lounging at the local Starbucks sipping your coffee while seemingly staring at nothing in particular. You have a foldable wireless keyboard and mini optical wireless mouse on the table yet no screen of any sort to look at. Starbucks staff start getting worried as you’ve been sitting there typing away and clicking your mouse with a blank expression on your face for over 3 hours now. ‘Has he gone cuckoo?’, they mutter to one another, ‘and what’s with those eyes?’
It’s not the eyes it’s what’s on ‘em. Folks from the University of Washington have found a way to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. They have tested these lenses on rabbits whose eyes haven’t shorted out so far. This technology opens up a world of possibilities. This article from UWs office of News and Information starts off with some possible future applications for this technology:
“Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes — visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.”
Read more about it here.
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