The Future Before Your Eyes

Imagine a world where your contact lenses double as a personal computer display, superimposing information in front of you. That virtual-reality dream, a staple of sci-fi movies, is a step closer thanks to the work of Seattle scientists who have been developing a prototype to generate images inside a contact lens. The information would appear about 50 centimetres from the user’s eye. The technology is some years off, but a researcher, Babak Parviz, and his colleagues at the University of Washington last week unveiled a prototype at a Beijing biomedical conference. My group works on building nano-scale electronic, optical, and biomedical devices, Professor Parviz said. We also work on integrating these devices into unconventional substrates — for example glass, plastic, paper. Since I put contact lenses on pretty much every morning, I guess it was just a matter of time putting the two together and wondering what we can do if we start putting these … tiny devices on a contact lens