
Electronic contact lens displays pixels on the eyes - illdave
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/11/electronic-contact-lens-displa.html
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tallanvor
It will be interesting to see if they are able to progressively scale up the
resolution while still ensuring that you can actually see out of the lens.

As cool as this is, though, I'm more interested in having them figure out more
ways of restoring vision rather than augmenting it. For purely selfish
reasons, I'm especially interested in retina replacement, which is being
worked on (they've been able to create new retinas using embryonic stem
cells), but I haven't heard of any studies having started yet to actually swap
out damaged retinas with the new ones.

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palish
How were your retinas damaged, if I may ask?

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tallanvor
Luckily it was only a single retina that was damaged, and it was due to a
parasite when I was under a year old, so I've never actually known what it was
like to have two good eyes.

You can get by with only one eye, but you don't have any real depth perception
and you don't get any benefits from 3D movies (although you still get all the
downsides). Plus, although I would love to try laser surgery to improve my
vision in my remaining "good" eye (if you can call needing -9.5 power lenses
good), the risks are still too high given the consequences if something went
wrong.

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jessriedel
Do doctors think you're brain did enough development when you were an infant
that it would handle visual info coming from your bad eye if your retina were
replaced? I was under the impression that someone like you (who grew up
without using the eye) might not be able to usefully interpret the signals
from the eye if it were repaired.

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felipemnoa
The brain can adapt to "seeing" images through the tongue [1] so I don't think
this would be a problem. The brain is always adapting to new inputs.

[1] <http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jun/feattongue>

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jessriedel
There are limits to its adaptability, especially for processing-heavy tasks
like vision for which the brain has specialized hardware. There is a world of
difference between interpreting 144 electrodes to pick out just a couple of
_bits_ of information, and seeing.

In particular, if the brain were infinitely plastic then you could just wire
the output from a HD video camera to some random spot on the brain and wait
for the brain to figure it out.

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mietek
Have you tried doing that?

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DanBC
I'm still waiting for easily affordable "Virtual Retinal Displays" (using a
laser focused on the retina) to be available:

(<http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/>)

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pavel_lishin
I'm waiting for the inevitable news stories that will follow - "Could hackers
hijack your VRD to fry your eyes with lasers? Tune in at 11."

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jasonabelli
I want one with facial recognition software. Never have that nervous moment
again when you have to do introductions and you are just not quite so sure
about your old acquaintances name.

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patrickod
That but with nice metadata associated with them. Imagine Rapportive in real
life. That would be incredibly useful.

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mike-cardwell
I look forward to the day when my enemies leave an unattended Facebook session
open, and I can update their status so they have a big "I'm carrying five
grand in my wallet right now" sign floating above their heads as they walk
around dark alleyways.

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DilipJ
I know that was in jest (if not, you may be turning into a supervillian), but
the actual implications of having facial recognition built into contacts is
immense. It will be a Minority Report type world, where anonymity would be
completely gone.

I guess it would mean no criminal outlaws or parole violators walking around,
but for a common man to not be able to walk anywhere without everyone around
him knowing everything there is to know about him....that's scary

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Symmetry
It is, but then again that's what most humans have lived their entire lives
doing, living in small communities where everyone knew everyone else since
childhood.

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DilipJ
isn't that why most people leave small towns, to go to a big city and be
anonymous. To be able to get away from their past?

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dfischer
Show me the best ratio to winning when playing Blackjack. WIN!

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delinka
Geez - this will spawn a whole new area of detection in casino security
systems. High resolution cameras capable of seeing the subtle reflective
changes in the eyeball, EM detectors at the doors for finding the minuscule
circuits on your eyes ...

I can also see the casinos' utopia coming to fruition: those without the
smarts to count cards, without the expertise to play properly, without all
their electronics gadgets, coming to play^W empty their wallets into buckets
owned by the casinos.

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pavel_lishin
How is that significantly different from the casinos' status quo?

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inty
Interestingly enough, I think a technology like this has to be monitored by
professional sports--maybe not now, but I could see this type of technology
being the new frontier in "cheating". It seems like the logical next step in
performance enhancement. Imagine a display that could read the velocity of a
fastball, measure the drop of a sinker, read a quarterbacks heart rate, or
judge which receiver is the most open. A lot of players in professional sports
already deal with technologically advanced contacts, though these are quite
rudimentary and merely change the tint (Yellow and Red) to allow for athletes
to see specific details much more clearly.

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JeffL
If everyone has access to these, then maybe it just makes the sports more
exciting and enjoyable for all the players and fans to have extra information?

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exDM69
Did anyone else think about the Eyephone episode of Futurama when they saw
this?

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rasur
I thought of Steve Mann's "eye tap"

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polyfractal
Was just about to post the same thing. Pretty nifty device, I've considered
building my own for a while now. It's pretty simple.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeTap>

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rasur
Yeah, I like the wearable computing idea much more than I like walking about
with a "smart" phone.

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tribeofone
As interesting as this is, I don't think embedding all this into a contact
lens is t he way to go. This is purely hypothetical but how about something
like this <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUdDhWfpqxg> (SixthSense) done with
a sort of polarity/light effect that could only be seen though a special
contact lens.

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Egregore
It's an interesting development, but unfortunately not tested on humans yet.
So we don't know yet the real resolution for human eye.

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delinka
How do you either keep them turned "upright" or detect rotation for updating
the images? Contacts slide around in the eye a bit and their shape keeps them
on the eye's lens pretty well, but there's no asymmetrical shape for keep the
contact lens from rotating.

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cstuder
Some lenses, I think mostly the soft ones, are asymmetrical: They are
intentionally heavier on the bottom and let gravity rotate them into place.

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gmac
Yes -- those are toric lenses, for correcting astigmatism. Unfortunately it
makes them rather thicker and less comfortable than the usual ones.

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mietek
Funnily enough, I just picked up today my first ever daily disposable lenses
for correcting astigmatism. These are the most comfortable lenses I've ever
worn, including regular daily disposables.

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meatsock
thread title incorrect, should be 'displays pixel'

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billybob
Wirelessly powering something that sits in my eye? I don't think so. Isn't it
about 10,000 times easier and safer to do a HUD using glasses than contacts?

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Cushman
At these scales? Probably not.

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dholowiski
From the article:

"The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed
on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a
transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit's eye. "

I'm a pretty rational person and I have no problem holding a cell phone up to
my head, but this scares me.

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wcoenen
Why? It would probably be a much weaker signal than that of a cellphone (~500
milliwatts). Assuming the tech is similar to short-range RFID, it could run on
a transmission power of a few milliwatts.

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leviathan
That sound you hear is the sound thousands of advertisers creaming their
pants.

Now you will have to look at that ad, even if you close your eyes.

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billybob
Not if the software is open source. On the contrary, you could run Adblock and
never see another billboard.

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sixtofour
Why would you think this could ever be open source. It will be expensive to
develop, and no corporation will spend the money to do so and then open source
the software. It may (not likely) be jail breakable, but you still have to pay
(probably) thousands to get it.

I was thinking one way for people to afford them would be to accept ads. I
would hate that, and I think I'd just wear glasses or normal contacts.

In fact I'd be much more attracted to this sort of thing in glasses, because
they'd likely be cheaper, and glasses can probably support more functions. And
you wouldn't have a radio receiver concentrating radio energy directly on your
eyes.

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jerf
Hardware isn't software. I run open source on my hardware, but my hardware
isn't open source. If your logic held, open source wouldn't be possible.

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sixtofour
Sometimes open source on locked down and jailbroken hardware is better.
Sometimes it bricks the hardware. I wonder what it's like to have a brick in
the eye?

Also this is a thing that goes in your body, and the FDA might have something
to say about open source in that context. Is there any open source software
running on pacemakers at the moment?

I think there are many more issues involved than simply "it's my hardware and
I'll do what I want with it." If we get better eyeware through open source
then great, but I'm skeptical at the moment that it can, much less will
happen.

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jerf
"I think there are many more issues involved than simply "it's my hardware and
I'll do what I want with it.""

Actually, that's kind of my point more than yours. It isn't as simple as a
knee-jerk "it must be closed source". You argued black and I argued not-black;
not-black isn't "white", it's white and the greys, too.

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sireat
First thing that came to my mind, was Neuromancer where the implanted
mirrorshades in Molly's eyes showed time.

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signa11
this: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision_pr.html> is just too
good to not mention here

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JoeAltmaier
Automatic photogrey eyes! Telescopic vision! Zoom!

