Advance Reality

Rabbits Wear Contact Lens With LED Display, Make Rabbit Friends Jealous

Posted on 08. Dec, 2009 by Alex in Artificial Intelligence

University of Washington professor Babak Parviz has taken humanity one step closer to building Iron Man with a contact lens that possesses a microcircuit-powered LED. Its working control circuits, power circuits, communications circuits, and antenna  provide a proof of concept for Augmented Reality lenses that could receive information from a phone or computer and display it directly on our eyes. Now several tech fanboy rabbits have attested to its safety.

Parviz, an engineer with expertise in nanotechnology, microfabrication, and self assembly, detailed the material and size restraints that held his team back in a mid October letter to the IEEE. First, conventional processes for producing the silicon parts are incompatible with the lens polymer, so the God-players fabricate most of their own parts, which they have ingeniously arranged to then self assemble. Then there’s the safety aspect; the whole circuit is toxic, so it must be covered in biocompatible polymers. The size limit is also tough: all of the electronic parts have to fit within a 1.2 millimeter circle on the lens. But while the rabbit only got to try out the single LED version, Parviz’s team has already produced lenses with an 8 by 8 array, and sets a 60 by 60 version as their end goal.

What various pixel resolutions look like. Keep in mind that Parviz hasn’t mastered color differentiation yet for his displays.

One last point: am I the only one uncomfortable with testing these lenses on rabbits? Bugs Bunny already causes enough trouble; with a GPS enabled heads up display and some Acme tactical nukes, he could very well pass Marvin the Martian as the number one threat to America.

Courtesy of Singularity Hub and IEEE Spectrum