DARPA Works On Virtual Reality Contact Lenses 129
gManZboy writes "Binoculars and night-vision goggles have their limits. So DARPA is doing work at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks to create wearable eye lenses with tiny, full-color displays onto which digital images can be projected, to give soldiers better situational awareness. The lenses would allow users to focus simultaneously on images that are both close up (perhaps a display) and far away (perhaps a battlefield.) Using virtual reality technologies to improve how soldiers perform on the battlefield has been a particular interest of the U.S. military for some time."
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
DARPA sets ambitious goals in order to make faster progress.
Re:It starts with lenses, next will be implants... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Short on details (Score:5, Informative)
Professor Babak Parviz [eetimes.com] has done some early work along these lines. Sounds like it might be some sort of inductive loop powering the circuits in the lens, with the external source being worn on your clothing or some headgear.
The article linked also touches on the question I immediately had about this - how do you produce an image or text on a contact lens that's legible to the wearer? If you think about elementary optics, you quickly realize having something in focus on the lens is not the same thing as having it in focus at some point beyond the lens. Basically it sounds like you need to have extremely thin corrective lenses built into the contact itself so the displayed item will be in focus on your retina.
Re:Short on details (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like it may be similar to Innovega's display at CES. Details (heavy in the marketing gloss) are available here. [innovega-inc.com]
To summarize, the human eye is pretty bad at focusing on things nearby. Close one eye and hold your hand a couple inches in front of the other, and you'll see what I mean. In order to get around this so far, all the augmented reality glasses you refer to need to use some tricks to make it seem like the image is farther away than it really is. This makes the screens bulkier, more expensive, etc. The idea here is to create a contact lens onto which you can project an image so that it gets superimposed on one's vision, in focus, without any trickery, thus simplifying the design and allowing the AR devices to be lighter, cheaper, maybe use less power, and so on.
As to how well it works, I have no idea. The info I linked to is quite obviously intended to attract investors and should be taken with a grain of salt. But if DARPA is working in the same vein, that would lend it some support.
Re:Short on details (Score:4, Informative)
From their diagram, it looks like each contact lens is composed of two lenses. Imagine making a tiny little lens that focuses a very close micro-display onto the retina and a normal sized contact lens for every-day use. Cut out the middle of the normal contact lens and insert this tiny little lens. You'll essentially have two "scenes" superimposed on your eye -- one focused on the micro-display and one focused on the surrounding environment. I imagine getting rid of aberrations on the tiny little lens is going to be very tricky and thus the resolution/image-quality of the entire display system might be quite limited. Another issue that's not so serious would be that your defocus bokeh would be kind of strange...
Re:It starts with lenses, next will be implants... (Score:4, Informative)
chiba.
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/burning_chrome/ [cyberpunk.ru]
Re:Just wondering (Score:4, Informative)
Now, whether or not that holds true once you make them capable of running a display, I dunno.