Sony developing smart contact lens that does more than let you see

By Kelly Hodgkins April 29, 2016

contact lens release drugs eye drops shutterstock photopixel — Photopixel/Shutterstock

One of the highlights of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is the smart contact lens that lets the character Trevor Hanaway record documents. A recent patent application by Sony takes this idea and adds a video recorder to the mix.

Sony’s patent application describes a pair of lenses with an organic electroluminescence display screen that allows you to view video, images, and other information. An onboard video recorder lets users record what they see with autofocus, exposure and aperture adjustment, and zooming to optimize the quality of the video.

Instead of recording a continuous stream like a car dash cam, the Sony contact lens can be controlled by the user with the blink of an eye. Embedded piezoelectric sensors can measure eyelid closure time, allowing it to differentiate between an average blink and extended blink for control. Wearers can use their blink to delete frames in a video recording and more. The lens also includes a gyro to detect when a user is tilting their head and can realign the video recording to the correct orientation. Last but not least is a power source that uses electromagnetic induction to keep the lens operating throughout the day.

Sony isn’t the only company looking to embed technology into eyewear. Samsung also revealed in a patent application that it is working on a competing smart contact lens with a built-in video recorder. In the medical field, scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology used their expertise to create a pair of contact lenses with 2.8x zoom designed to help users with degenerative eye diseases. Google also invented a contact lens that can be powered by the sun.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…

Mobile

The iPhone’s viewfinder might soon let you see both cameras simultaneously

iPhone 8 Plus vs Note 8 camera shootout header

Apple may be considering beefing up the viewfinder in the camera app for dual-lens iPhones. The company was awarded a new patent that shows views from both camera sensors on the display at the same time, essentially allowing users to see the difference between two cameras and better judge which would be better for a particular use.

The new patent is called "Digital Viewfinder User Interface for Multiple Cameras," and shows that users would be able to zoom from both cameras where appropriate, and even offer a composite image when the appropriate zoom for a particular setting sits between the two cameras. Users would also be able to zoom each camera individually from the viewfinder.

Emerging Tech

Experimental contact lenses could let you shoot lasers from your eyes. Seriously

shooting lasers out of eyes cyclops x men

Who would have thought that the future of biometric security systems would involve cows shooting lasers out of their eyes? That does, however, describe work being carried out by researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. They’ve developed ultrathin, bendable laser stickers which can be adhered to an eyeball, via contact lens -- as shown in a recent demo using a cow’s eye. Because the laser lenses can be made to emit a well-defined combination of several wavelength of laser light, they could potentially be useful for authentication technology.

“A number of years ago, I published work on turning individual living cells into tiny, microscopic lasers,” Malte Gather, a physics professor who worked on the project, told Digital Trends. “The initial idea back then was to investigate if biological systems are capable of producing laser light since this is not observed in nature. One of the reporters picking up on the story joked that the next thing this would develop into would be superheroes shooting deadly laser beams out of their eyes, just like in popular comic books. When we realized that we may have a way to make laser stickers, I remembered this comment and we decided to run some tests sticking our lasers onto contact lenses and onto cow’s eyes.”

Photography

Canon’s fingerprint scanner idea does more than just lock the camera down

canon fingerprint scanner idea lens4 flip

Fingerprint ID technology on smartphones may already seem old hat to some, but it appears that camera companies are now taking a close look at it for some of their own devices.

A recent Canon patent shows a fingerprint sensor not only on the front of a camera body, but also on the side of a lens (marked 46 and 32, respectively, in the diagram below).