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Google's smart contact lens, for detecting glucose levels (diabetes)

Google has invented a new smart contact lens with an integrated camera. The camera would be very small and sit down near the edge of the contact lens and so that it doesn't obscure your vision. By virtue of existence role of the contact lens, the camera would naturally follow your gaze, allowing for a huge range of crawly applications, from the basis of a bionic heart system for bullheaded and visually impaired people, through to early on warning systems (the photographic camera spots a adventure earlier your brain does), facial recognition, and superhuman powers (scope and infrared/dark vision). In related news, Google Glass is publicly bachelor today in the US for one day but (even so priced at $1500).

This new smart contact lens would have a tiny CMOS camera sensor just below your pupil, control circuit, and some method of receiving power wirelessly (more on that subsequently). Because an imaging sensor, past definition, has to absorb lite, information technology wouldn't be transparent — simply it could probably be color matched to your iris, and then that your eyes don't wait too freaky.

A diagram of Google's smart contact lens with integrated camera

A diagram of Google'southward smart contact lens with integrated camera [Image credit: Patent Bolt]

As you tin can probably imagine, there are some rather astonishing applications if you have two cameras embedded in your contact lenses. You can't practise much in the way of image processing on the contact lens itself, but y'all could stream it to a nearby smartphone or head-mounted brandish (i.due east. Google Drinking glass), where a more powerful computer could perform all sorts of real-time magic. Google suggests that the cameras might warn you if there's oncoming traffic at a crosswalk — useful for a normal-sighted person, but utterly invaluable for a bullheaded or partially sighted person. For me, the more exciting possibilities include facial recognition (a la Terminator), and abilities that verge on the super or transhuman, such every bit being able to digitally zoom in and infrared thermal nighttime vision. (Read: What is transhumanism, or, what does information technology hateful to be human?)

Terminator enhanced vision display stillAcross the medical- and consumer-oriented applications, you can also imagine the possibilities if police force were equipped with contact lenses that could spot criminal faces in a oversupply, or a bulge under a jacket that could be a curtained weapon. Oh, and the well-nigh heady/deadly application of them all: Soldiers with smart contact lenses that warning them to incoming fire, provide infrared vision that can see through smoke, real-fourth dimension range finding for more than authentic sniping…

Single pixel contact lens display, in a rabbit's eye

A contact lens display in a rabbit's eye (manner back in 2011)

This invention, from the Google X skunkworks lab, comes in the class of a patent that was filed in 2012 and was recently published by the US PTO. Before this year, Google announced that it was working on a smart contact lens for diabetics that provides a existent-time glucose level reading from your tears. As far every bit we can tell, there'due south no timeline for existent-world trials of either diverseness of contact lens — but we can tell you that the technology to create such devices is very nearly here. Fashion back in 2011, a smart contact lens with an LED display was trialed in the lab.

Moving forward, there are some concerns almost ability delivery (in that location's no space for a battery, of form, so it has to be beamed in wirelessly), and whether it's wise to have a wireless device implanted in a rather sensitive organ, only I don't think these will be game-breaking problems. For now, nosotros're talking about fairly chunky contact lenses that are all-time suited to laboratory testing — but it shouldn't exist more than a few years until existent, comfortable smart contact lenses come to market place.