Well, not quite. But this is still pretty neat: Engineers at the University of Washington have created a “biologically safe” contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. The new technology was presented yesterday at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems.
So what does the lens do? Not much at the moment. But future developments are “extremely promising,” says Babak Parviz, an electrical engineer and assistant professor at UW. Image being able to monitor your heart rate on a floating virtual dashboard while you’re working out, for example. Or checking out the stock ticker literally from the corner of your eye. Or switching to thermographic vision, Terminator-style. Okay, maybe we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. “People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about,” says Parviz. For now, “our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it’s safe.”
