Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality screens on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company’s design.
Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can place an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most wearable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on smart contact lens design since 2015and the latest prototype Mojo Lens packed in a pretty impressive amount of gear – especially for something that has to live behind your eyelid.
For starters, it has the world’s smallest, highest-density display capable of displaying dynamic content – a green monochrome MicroLED display less than 0.5mm (0.02in) in diameter and with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch. . It has an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5 GHz radio capable of ultra-low latency communication, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, keeping the image stable even when you move your eyes around.
Mojo Vision
It has a medical-grade micro battery built into the outer ring – which will be big enough to run the thing all day long in the final product version – as well as power management circuitry and a wireless charging system. And you don’t need a hand control, or a smartphone, or even Meta’s crazy nerve-hacking control inputs to operate it – Mojo Vision has designed a hands-free user interface controlled by your own eye movements.
And again, this is all kept so extraordinarily slim and compact that you can stick it on your eyeball and still stretch your lid over it without the use of a shoehorn. That’s what Perkins did on June 23 at Mojo’s lab in Saratoga, California, becoming the first person to ever wear this feature-complete AR smart contact lens.
His comments on the experience were quite succinct: “After completing preclinical testing and mitigating potential safety risks, I wore Mojo Lens,” Perkins said in a blog post. “To my delight, I discovered that I could communicate with a compass to determine my position, view images, and use an on-screen teleprompter to read a startling yet familiar quote. I have the future firsthand. experienced with Invisible Computing … Wearing the lens was inspiring. When I saw the future, I literally ran out of words.”
Mojo Vision
Thus begins the Mojo Vision testing process. The company will have a range of other people test the lens and provide feedback that will be turned into a production intent version that will be further developed and submitted to the FDA for market approval. Meanwhile, the company is working with app developers to build functionality for the device for when it launches.
“We hope Mojo Lens will change the lives of people with visual impairments,” writes Perkins, “by improving their ability to perform everyday tasks that many of us take for granted. I imagine amateur and professional athletes wearing Mojo Lens so they can train smarter, stay focused and achieve peak performance.Ultimately, this is a tool that can give people an invisible assistant all day long to stay focused without losing access to the information they need to feel confident in any situation.”
The company cannot yet say when it expects a product on the shelves, but in a interview with IEEE SpectrumMojo’s Senior VP of Product and Marketing Steve Sinclair estimates the price will be roughly that of a high-end smartphone. It sounds like it’s a little fiddly to put on too, as it’s designed to work in a specific direction.
Mojo Vision
But this certainly seems next-level; AR headsets themselves are still at a rudimentary level, and Mojo already seems pretty close with a product that could make other designs obsolete pretty quickly if it does what it says, and might get a color screen soon. Very handy stuff.
Source: Mojo Vision