Electronic Contact Lens Displays Pixels On the Eye

An anonymous reader writes "The future of augmented-reality technology is here — as long as you're a rabbit. Bioengineers have placed the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into the eyes of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans. The bunnies suffered no ill effects, the researchers say."

Terminator-style wouldn't be useful

[RadioElectric]

You can't read text in your peripheral vision. The best they could hope for would be sticking rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) text in the fovea (i.e. flashing up a rapid sequence of words right in the centre of the visual field). This could work, but it's hard to see why anybody would want it. You wouldn't be able to multi-task, because the text would be in the way. You wouldn't be able to access the text in a non-serial fashion either, which removes any advantage over having it presented in audio form.

Re:This makes no sense

[AikonMGB]

You should get a research position with the lab, you obviously have a far deeper understanding of the subject.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

hijack strangers' eyes

[roman_mir]

the next big thing: hijack other people's vision by cracking whatever needs to be cracked (and it seems there is nothing to crack there, except the frequency at this point), send advertising directly into people's eyes.

You can't even CLOSE your eyes at that point, you close your eyes and the images still keep on coming! (which, by the way, could be a new way to do something about insomnia for some people, just project the jumping sheep right into the eyes for a while).

Re:No ill effects, but can they see them?

[Chris Mattern]

Correct. Fortunately, this doesn't add greatly to the difficulty of the task. In any case, the first task is proving we won't put somebody's eye out with this thing. Getting a really nice looking picture comes later, since it pretty much requires putting it in a human eye (rabbits are lousy at describing what they're seeing), which requires us to know we won't be hurting said humans by doing so.

Re:Terminator-style wouldn't be useful

[frostfreek]

Well, what if there was a computer attached to it with sensors that could read your eyeball's orientation, and adjust the display so that the floating text appeared to be a stationary object.
Then, reading from a page would look about the same as looking at a semi-transparent monitor.

Is it possible to track an eye that fast?

I can see it now, "Vision Display 1.1, now with MotionPlus(tm)"

Robocop/Terminator Vision

[Dusthead Jr.]

Yes I know it's all fiction and all that, but I always seem to imagine the whole "Robocop/Terminator" vision thing as taking place inside their brain rather than on the surface of their eyes. Something like video gen-lock that takes the video feed and overlays text on top, bypassing the whole focusing issue. I remember trying to visualize what how that would work in a pair of glasses, so I put my cellphone right up to my eye while trying to keep the screen in focus. I could, sort of painfully. Then I also realized that I would need to focus on the everything else. I would have to focus on something very close and far away, at the same time. I would like to know how they accomplished this.

Re:ooh pick me pick me

[wiedzmin]

For every hot woman on the planet, there is a guy who is sick and tired of banging her. It's not the fact that his wife may be ugly, it's just that she's his wife man.