http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/11/electronic-contact-lens-displa.html
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.
I’m still curious about how useful it is to have pixels on something plastered to your eyeball. Is there any way to actually make it so that you can usefully focus on something that close? Or even if you can, do so at the same time as focusing on the rest of the world to allow for actual augmented reality?
The longer range question all of that prompts is: Are the problems with getting a physical display to actually work right and overlay on top of the real world for somebody likely to be solved before we have a good enough understanding of the optic nerve to be able to just put the information there?
Normally, I’d say the answer was obviously that we don’t know enough about how to read and write data from and to the optic nerve, but this makes you think maybe it’s not as far off as you’d think:
http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity
And the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo
Still, very fascinating stuff.
