Bionic lenses have been in development for over a decade. The revolution in technology is already within reach.
Human Vision 3x Better
A Canadian optometrist is developing a bionic lens that could improve human vision up to 3x better than 20/20.
Imagine being able to see three times better than 20/20 vision without wearing glasses or contacts — even at age 100 or more — with the help of bionic lenses implanted in your eyes.
Dr. Garth Webb, an optometrist in British Columbia who invented the Ocumetics Bionic Lens, says patients would have perfect vision and that driving glasses, progressive lenses and contact lenses would become a dim memory as the eye-care industry is transformed.
Webb says people who have the specialized lenses surgically inserted would never get cataracts because their natural lenses, which decay over time, would have been replaced.
“If you can just barely see the clock at 10 feet, when you get the Bionic Lens you can see the clock at 30 feet away,” says Webb, demonstrating how a custom-made lens that folded like a taco in a saline-filled syringe would be placed in an eye, where it would unravel itself within 10 seconds.
LED Wearable Contact Lens
A team of US and Finnish bioengineers have embedded an antenna, radio receiver, control circuitry, and LED into a wearable contact lens. The technology is currently being tested by rabbits, in their research lab at the University of Washington, Seattle.
The team, led by Babak Praviz, has successfully displayed a single, remotely-controlled pixel onto a contact lens worn by a rabbit. Power from an external battery is transmitted via RF to an antenna that runs around the edge of the contact lens (the gold ring that you see in the image below), so that the wearer’s vision isn’t obstructed. An integrated circuit harvests the energy, and then powers an LED (which emits a nice blue light, incidentally, and is focused by way of the entire contact lens being a Fresnel lens). The IC doesn’t do much else at the moment – it’s basically just a 450 picofarad storage capacitor built with a 130nm CMOS processor – but this is enough to discretely control an on-lens pixel from a remote radio source.
Limitations: The single-pixel contact lens display, because of its tiny antenna, has to have a power source within 10cm (it’s very similar to RFID/NFC in this regard). This problem could be overcome with a battery pack hooked over your ear, though (or if you’re a hardcore transhumanist, embedded into your scalp or spine). The other issue is that this is just a single pixel – but even there, you can imagine military uses (“missile lock!”) or perhaps just as a custom notification (“you have email!”)
These aside, this invention is significant because the rabbit was alive, and no damage to the rabbit’s eye was found after the lens was removed. The research team have already drawn up plans to project multiple pixels onto a single contact lens by using an array of micro-Fresnel lenses, too (see main image). Ultimately, our grasp of semiconductors and optics is now so advanced that we can shrink all of the necessary components for a computer display into a contact lens. Bionic vision really is just around the corner now.
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