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Officially called "A single-pixel wireless contact lens display" the super lens, which researchers successfully tested on rabbits, is comprised of a polymer substrate, light-emitted diode, antenna, and an integrated circuit to harvest the wireless power. Researchers built the lens through a highly complex process that included fabricating the antenna, electrical interconnects, electrical isolation and pads for solder coating directly on the contact lens.
To successfully build a working lens, the researchers had to overcome several key challenges. First of all, the lens display, which sits in a live eye, is standalone, meaning it can't have wires running out of it. So power transmission and storage all has to happen wirelessly and primarily on the lens itself. Obviously, the lens had to be bio-compatible with the human eye -- it can't inflame or in any way damage the sensitive organ and the radio frequencies have to remain at safe levels. The third and most obvious challenge was building the necessary technology at a "micrometer scale."
A red LED, which was used on a previous test lens, was subsequently replaced with a blue micro-LED mounted on a sapphire wafer. Researchers found that, due to the proximity to the retina, they could not focus the blue light. So a series of micro-thin Fresnel lenses were added to rectify the image.
The finished lens was tested on an anesthetized rabbit with no ill effects -- though no one has asked the rabbit for comment.
A single pixel does not an image make, but this is clearly the first step in always-available heads up display and augmented reality. University of Washington researchers envision a whole spectrum of uses for the lens technology. From the research paper submitted to the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering in September:
"As contact lens based biosensors advance, they may alert the wearer of physiological anomalies, such as irregular glucose or lactate levels. With more colors and increased resolution, contact lenses may display text, be used with gaming devices, or offer cues from navigation systems."
Obviously, researchers are working on ways to build more color, resolution and computing power into these lenses. Yet, even with just a handful of pixels, researchers believe future lenses could communicate short emails, text messages and navigational information. Someone wearing more powerful lenses could also, someday, look at a store and see a Yelp Monocle-style overlay of information. "If such displays were successfully deployed, they would fundamentally change the nature of interaction between humans and visual information," note researchers in their paper.
Don't go shopping for super contact lenses just yet. The researchers only built a one blue pixel display and also found that the natural conditions of a living eye dramatically diminish the lenses’ ability to hold power. Surely a problem they can overcome, but it could be quite a few years before we're all walking around with super eyes.