You put on your leggings, put on your sneakers and go for a run. Today it’s ten kilometers. Of the pull You’re not in the gym, so you’re missing your everyday treadmill. You are not very fond of wearing a smartwatch or a Fitbit-type activity bracelet, really. Nothing that requires looking at the doll every few minutes. No matter. And it doesn’t matter because all the information you need: the route, your heart rate, exercise routines, calories burned, the time you’ve been running… All that slides before your eyes, as data suspended over the landscape.
The secret? None. You are wearing a pair of smart contact lenses, the technology that aspires to retire or, at the very least, put augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) glasses in serious trouble, using its great asset: its size, discreetness and comfort.
It may sound like science fiction, but there are companies working on lenses capable of offering us the same information as a smartwatch, only projected directly onto our eyes. Mojo Vision has long been developing lenses that incorporate a microLED screen no bigger than a grain of sand and sensors powered by solid-state batteries. All integrated into a prosthesis that also acts like conventional contact lenses and helps correct vision.
Opportunities… and challenges
“Together with a micro-optic and a custom silicon backplate chip, the display can project brilliant text, graphics, and high-resolution video onto the user’s retina that are viewable indoors, outdoors, or even with the eyes closed.” assures the company, which specifies that its MicroLed is “the smallest and densest screen in the world ever created for dynamic content”: 0.5 millimeters (mm) in diameter and a pixel size of 1.8 microns.
One of its great assets compared to other VR and AR glasses is a system that makes precise eye tracking possible. “It can provide critical information without interrupting or distracting you,” the company abounds. A large part of its strategy is based on a concept that it defines as Invisible Computing, “a computing experience in which information is available and is presented only when it is needed”, in a discreet, fast way that does not require much attention from the user.
That in theory. But… How does it translate into practice? What applications does it have on a daily basis? Much of its speech focuses on athletes and the company itself has already announced agreements with multinationals such as Adidas or 18Birdies. Its objective is that when training athletes have statistics and information about their own bodies in real time and by blow of the corneawithout having to look away, look down, or operate any device with your hands.
Beyond running tracks and gyms, the possibilities opened up by smart glasses are as rich as those of AR/VR glasses, although with a valuable plus: they go practically unnoticed. They can be a great help for, for example, a lecturer who wants to do without notes; musicians who want to see how the scores and lyrics slide before their eyes; or any traveler who needs to take a flight and appreciates directly consulting information about their service, such as the terminal or boarding gate, without having to search for screens.
Mojo is not the only one working on the possibilities that smart lenses could open. As the BBC points out, there are those who are already exploring its applications in the health field.
At the University of Surrey, for example, they have developed a contact lens equipped with a photodetector, a temperature sensor and a glucose sensor capable of measuring tear fluid levels. The prosthesis, they say, is flexible, very fine and since the sensor is in direct contact with the eye, its measurements stand out for their precision. Other interesting applications extend to the diagnosis of pathologies or even the planning of their treatment.
Of course not everything is advantages and strengths.
Smart contact lenses present significant challenges. From the outset, they imply a technological challenge. How to power the batteries, which will also have to be exceptionally small and thin? What autonomy will they offer? How will they communicate? Mojo has had to design an ASIC with an ARM Core M0 processor that transmits the lens sensors and AR content to the MicroLED display. In addition, CNET specifies, it requires wearing a device around the neck.
And beyond the technical complications… If the use of conventional contact lenses requires taking maximum care of hygiene or avoiding excessive use, what will also happen with a device such as the one proposed by Mojo Vision? At least in April, his lenses all his mechanism.
Perhaps the greatest of its challenges, however, is at the regulatory level and its complicated balance with the privacy and intimacy, both of the user himself and of the people who are in his environment. “Any inconspicuous device with a forward-facing camera that allows photos or videos to be taken presents privacy risks to bystanders,” Access Now’s Daniel Leufer told the BBC.
If it is already a point of conflict in VR/AR glasses, which can activate a red light when recording, what happens when it is a lens capable of going completely unnoticed? The challenges not only extend to the user’s environment; in a certain way they affect him. How to deal with all the information that a contact lens like the ones proposed by Mojo would be able to collect, what would happen if the device collected information about what we see and how that influences our body?
Images | MojoVision
