Now we can have a tiny computer display in our eye through the ongoing work with opto-electronic contact lenses taking place at the University of Washington in Seattle.The lab there has been showing off the latest prototype, the handiwork of Dr. Babak Parviz: a semi-transparent array – including an LED – embedded into a contact lens that receives 330 microwatts of power wirelessly from a nearby RF transmitter. Parviz has been using the prototypes to display biosensor feedback about the wearer’s vital signs, but they’ll eventually serve as a heads-up display for displaying other data.The wireless power is picked up by a loop antenna built into the lens, and future iterations of the hardware are expected to integrate the transmitter into a cellphone. There’ll also be far many more LEDs involved, so that the resolution is high enough to be useful.
