The way forward for imaginative and prescient: Augmented Actuality contact lenses are right here

Augmented reality contact lenses have been around the corner for years. You are finally ready to arrive. Mojo vision

Technology changes every aspect of our lives. Once a week in The Future of Series, we examine innovations in key areas, from agriculture to transportation, and what they will mean in the years and decades to come.

A decade ago, Google’s ambitions seemed unchecked: the company designed self-driving cars through Waymo, sponsored moonbases, and even conquered death. One of the company’s plans: Smart contact lenses to measure the glucose levels in your tears – and potentially reduce the damage caused by diabetes. “It’s still early days for this technology, but we’ve completed several clinical research studies that will help refine our prototype,” wrote Brian Otis and Babak Parviz of Google in 2014.

Seven years later, the company’s ego remains just as inflated, but Verily’s smart contact lenses are nowhere to be seen. The Google mother alphabet side project was officially discontinued in 2018. Thanks to the efforts of countless scientists and engineers, smart lenses are finally becoming a reality. And the future of this fascinating technology does not meet your expectations.

Today (-ish): A dream for a long time, smart contacts are there

Of course, a lot of effort has gone into developing contact lenses. Acuvue sells Oasys with transition lenses that automatically darken in sunlight, like tiny sunglasses for your students. Researchers have been working for years on smart lenses that zoom when needed, measure the level of chemicals in your body, and administer medication (especially antihistamines). But wise? They never really made it to market.

InWith Corp. will change that. At CES 2021, the company unveiled a method by which augmented vision display chips can be incorporated into the soft hydrogel contact lenses that millions of people wear every day. Smart contact lenses! In early 2020, the company announced a partnership with Bausch + Lomb that will showcase flexible electronic circuits embedded directly into lenses. No, you can’t buy it yet. But they’re clearly almost there – and not just from InWith.

“It’s closer than you think, but it’s not tomorrow,” said Steve Sinclair, senior vice president of product for Mojo Vision. Mojo is InWith’s big competitor, and has secretly developed lenses that incorporate an enormous number of proprietary technologies, including a near-invisible micro-LED display less than half a millimeter (think of a grain of sand), tiny Inertial sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes, a highly efficient image sensor for measuring the world around you, adorable little batteries, and much more.

Mojo Vision contact lenses promise to improve our vision.

Like InWith’s lenses, Mojo’s are “just around the corner,” Sinclair told me. About a dozen people in his company have worn the latest prototypes, and a new model this summer promises to be even more progressive. What can you do with them Augmented reality apps probably come to mind, at least to me: directional overlays that guide you through unfamiliar city streets, information about the people and buildings you pass, and so on. But the power of a display in your eye isn’t what you might expect. Sinclair has a variety of use cases, things that will give you your mojo back (hence the company’s name): the text of a great speech, notes for a presentation, a checklist for a major repair project, and so on.

One area that will be important is competitive sport: today’s runners have a world of metrics on their wrists, but who wants to navigate a menu while sprinting at top speed? Imagine the power of biometric data right in your field of vision.

And what about AR? Eh, we’ll get there.

Meanwhile, smart lenses for people with low vision – glaucoma, macular degeneration, etc. – show promise. Mojos Chips will be able to capture the scene in front of a person and enhance buildings in real time, increase contrast around characters and people, and help visually impaired people navigate the world around them. This could be a game changer – but it’s just the beginning.

Tomorrow: Is Infrared Vision In Your Future?

Vision is a complex dance between your hardware (i.e. your retina, lens, the tiny rods and cones, etc.) and your brain, which interprets the electrical impulses sent by your eyes and translates them into images. Your brain can, to a certain extent, fix bugs in your hardware. It may not have to be in the future.

Smart lenses could one day correct, or even completely replace, an incomplete lens and correct those electrical impulses before your brain receives them for interpretation. Smart lenses can also throw various data in front of your lenses, giving you super-binocular or infrared vision. Heck, researchers have already researched supermice with infrared vision. Why not you? The potential powers you could get with a new contact pair are limitless once the technology is perfected.

“We’re on the brink of finding out what some of these things are,” Sinclair told me. “The sky is the limit of what we can do with the information and the platform we’ve built.”

“It’s like talking to Siri 15.0.”

Look further into the post-smartphone era, and lenses like this one could replace our eyes. For 140 years, futurist Gary Bengier, a former Silicon Valley technologist, writer and philosopher, imagines a world where displays are not just worn in contact lenses, but are actually part of you thanks to a chip inserted and connected behind your ear to a corneal implant. In his new book Unfettered Journey, he describes how artificial intelligence and interfaces between mind and machine are combined with retinal implants to essentially integrate Wikipedia directly into your body:

“He selected the distinctive towers of an occasional fusion device. Joe hadn’t taken a long flight since graduating from high school. The scene below piqued his scientific curiosity. He let the keyword search fill his head and opened the NEST corneal junction, and images and words filled the corner of his eye. “

Wild stuff, right?

“You’re basically using this to connect to the cloud, the network, or whatever. It’s like talking to Siri 15.0, “Bengier told me recently. In the not-too-distant future, he believes, smarter artificial intelligence will be combined with data on where you are and sensors that will capture your every whim. You can just think of pizza and see a little map on your cornea that shows where to buy one.

That is one vision after vision.

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