in front of a reader but instead lots of images all around the readers, making them feel as though they are surrounded by dinosaurs or in front of the catwalk in Milan or soaring over the Grand Canyon. Outlandish? No, quite plausible.
Using digital contact lenses, images
can be projected on surfaces around the reader. We’re not quite there yet technologically, but the students’ research proved that today’s single-pixel wireless contact lenses already take power and radio signals from an external source.
To evolve that lens into one capable
of full-colour display will require a matrix-addressable micro-LED array with many more pixels small enough for a contact lens and a micro lens to focus the picture on the retina. A group of scientists from the University of Washington in the US and Aalto University in Finland have developed these kinds of arrays with up to eight working pixels.
Micro displays with higher resolution have already been made. The students
“Using digital contact lenses, images can be projected on surfaces around the reader.”
did admit to some remaining challenges (fitting all of the components on a lens, getting all the components to be small enough, and guaranteeing the safety of an electronic object in a reader’s eye).
As a result, they envision a new
world of magazine reading. “Reading magazines through digital contact lenses will make it possible to experience the events on a different level,” they wrote.
“The greatest advantage of the digital contact lenses,” wrote the students, “is that the consumer will no longer feel that he or she is looking through a device in order to see the augmented reality and thus elevate the level of immersion and merge the lines between reality and fiction.