A 2022 CNET article by Scott Stein said that “smart” contact lens may not be too far in the future.
A company called Mojo Lens (pictured) has made a self-contained display-enabled lens that the company says is finally ready for internal testing. Now XPANCEO, a deep tech company that’s developing the first smart contact lenses with XR and health monitoring features, has announced a successful proof of concept for the world’s first augmented reality holographic lens testing system.
This marks an essential step towards progressing from Apple Vision Pro to the next generation of computing – XR smart contact lenses, according to Dr. Valentine S. Volkov, XPANCEO’s co-founder and scientist. The system allows the replication of AR experiences in diverse contexts such as sports, gaming, and navigation, enabling safe immediate tests of holographic optical elements without the necessity for human trials, he adds.
“The primary focus for us during this year will be the production of new prototypes and enhancing the current ones, so such optic testing system is a pivotal step towards the first all-in-one XR smart contact lenses,” says Volkov. “This system will allow XR industry players to evaluate such parameters as the field of view, the brightness of the virtual image, the gradient of intensity across the field, changes in image contrast due to the different weather conditions, and more, which will speed up the development process and may lead to growth in the smart lenses market.”
Mojo Lens says its product is a contact lens with a built-in display that provides people with “useful and timely information they want without forcing them to look down at a screen or losing focus on the people and the world around them.” Mojo calls this eyes-up experience “Invisible Computing.”
Apple and smart contact lens
In March 2021, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that my favorite tech company was planning augmented reality contact lens for the 2030s.
As far back as 2016, Apple was supposedly looking into smart/augmented reality contact lens.
“We are having an introductory conversation with Apple about the iOS platform, being the chosen platform for our augmented lens development program,” Michael Hayes, president, EP Global Communications, which specializes in the manufacturing and the integration of electronics into modern Silicone Hydrogel lenses, said at the time. “We anticipate that our augmented lenses will communicate with smart phone applications for display, so we must explore platforms that we can become compatible with. iOS is obviously one of the platforms we are keenly interested in.”
There’s been no further developments on the matter that I’m aware of. But Apple, like other companies, is almost certainly experimenting with smart contacts.
