A U.S. firm, Innovega, recently released information about a new display system that combines a pair of lightweight glasses with a built-in translucent screen with a pair of nanoscale-engineered contact lenses to deliver a 3-D viewing experience equivalent to watching a 240-inch TV from 10 feet away. The contacts are there to help focus the image within the eye, which allows the glasses providing the display images to be less bulky. The contact lenses are said to wearers to simultaneously focus on the near-eye displays and more distant objects, which permits the combination of digital content with normal viewing of the real world around users..
As such, one DARPA spokesman indicated that the system could be used as both a full "virtual reality" display that shuts out outside images, and for augmented reality images where digital information appears to be overlaid on top of what the user would normally see.
'Instead of oversized virtual reality helmets, digital images are projected onto tiny full-color displays that are very near the eye.'
The glasses that provide the actual screen and image can be paired with smartphones, tablets, or portable game devices (in consumer versions) that would deliver the video or other images. There are also military applications for heads-up displays for targeting or other battlefield information.
As with all of these glasses-display systems, I have to wonder how well they'd adapt to people with less than perfect vision. Somehow, these press releases don't seem to address that.
Source -
Virtual reality contact lenses that beam images directly into your eyes could be on sale in 2014, Mail Online Science & Tech blog.
