Our phone screens might soon be replaced by contact lenses. However, augmented reality will be the more significant change, whereby glasses or contact lenses show information on the environment around us so that we may simultaneously perceive the actual and virtual worlds. Multitasking is one activity that people enjoy doing (although ineffectively in many situations). As we wear more and more electronics on our bodies, such as earphones, watches, and soon eyewear, the newest component of invisible computing, phones will resemble small servers that control all of these devices.
Numerous engineers are working to make that vision a reality at an ordinary office building in Saratoga, California. They produce prototypes of a smart contact lens that is packed with tiny circuits, batteries, and one of the smallest displays on a weekly basis. One of Silicon Valley’s most ambitious hardware projects right now, Mojo Vision’s lenses are an engineering feat. To enable an eyeball to breathe through an electronic lens, the business had to create its own chemicals and plastic compounds. The lenses are clearly thick and big enough to cover some of the whites of the eyes beyond the iris. David Hobbs, the startup’s senior director of product management who has worn numerous prototypes, said, “It’s not uncomfortable.”
The lens has nine pacemaker-style titanium batteries and a flexible circuit that is no wider than a human hair to provide all the power and data. The pixels are crammed into only two microns, or about 0.002 millimetres, and are magnified using a slightly convex mirror that bounces light off a tiny reflector to mimic the mechanics of a telescope. That little show appears as a pinprick of light from a few feet away.
