Telescopic Contact Lens With Switchable Magnification To Help AMD Patients 68
cylonlover writes "Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness among older adults in the western world. Unfortunately, conventional optical aids provide little help for a retina which has lost the acuity of its central area. Now a team of multinational researchers led by University of California, San Diego Professor Joseph Ford has created a telescopic contact lens that can switch between normal and magnified vision to offer AMD patients a relatively unobtrusive way to enhance their vision."
It needs glasses??? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you need glasses to switch between magnification and no magnification, then why not simply make the glasses do the magnification?
This seems to be rather silly in my book.
Now, the implantable zoomming replacement eye lense that costs $25,000 an eye they dismissed as too expensive, no THAT seems worth talking about.
Any reason these have to be corrective only? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there some fundamental reason why these are only useful to someone with damaged vision? Since they are not implanted and have no moving parts, they shouldn't be much worse than regular contact lenses, which some people wear for purely cosmetic reasons. The biggest problem I can see would be the light loss from the polarizing glasses. Two stops is significant, especially at night, and the ability of the iris to compensate will be hampered by the size of the central pupil in the contact lens.