When I had a lens replacement op at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, surely one of the best on the planet, my eye surgeon (ditto) told me that he was working with the SAS to improve their night vision.
Understandably, he wouldn’t tell me any more, and I now wonder if he was ahead of the game using a new type of autofocus lens.
It’s the brainchild of Hongrui Jiang, a professor of engineering at Wisconsin University , U.S. His liquid contact lenses give perfect vision at any distance, even as conditions change and it gets darker. And thanks to his ingenious design, the lenses automatically focus in less than a blink of an eye.
More than a billion people worldwide are thought to suffer long-sightedness – and an estimated 13.5 million people in the UK – which is common after the age of 40.
This is because the eyeball changes shape and the lenses often thicken and become stiff. While spectacles can correct this, Prof Jiang aims to give patients the vision they had in their youth with contact lenses which are focused by tiny, solar-powered computers.
His landmark discovery, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is an ‘artificial eye’ that can sharpen images in twilight or even at night-time.
Night vision is inevitably compromised as we get older, especially in women after the menopause when lack of oestrogen causes it to deteriorate.
Many animals, even insects, have better eyes than we do – Prof Jiang’s device is based on the eyes of the elephant nose fish, which lives in the muddy rivers of West and Central Africa.
The fish uses its trunk to detect faint electrical signals given off by its prey, and to enable this, the fish’s retina is composed of tiny cups that concentrate what little light there is in the murky water, boosting its vision.
Prof Jiang and his team used a laser to carve the glass lens of a man-made eye with more than 2,000 tiny cups, which he then coated with aluminium to funnel the light.
He says the first prototypes are five to 10 years away. In the meantime, the technology could improve the sensitivity of cameras for use in low light and devices used in surgery, or even in spaceflight.
“Our artificial eye will be a powerful compact night-vision camera with low-distortion characteristics,” Prof Jiang and his colleagues write.
The idea could potentially be expanded to X-rays and infrared use in endoscopes, robots and space exploration.