Today, a handful of soldiers with advanced gear can see a few digital maps, through helmet-mounted monocles. Some pilots can get data about their world, on heads-up displays. But one day, troops could see an info-"augmented" reality all around them, with contact lenses that provide "first-person shooter-type video game" environments to those that wear them. At least, that’s the idea behind the latest project from DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky science and technology division.
The agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office announced Wednesday that it’s looking for information on "the creation of micro- and nano-scale display technologies for the purpose of creating displays that could be worn as transparent contact lenses." And not in some far-off future. But in "three to five years."
A limiting factor to untethered, augmented and/or mixed reality applications is the bulkiness, power consumption, cost, limited resolution and limited field of view of head-mounted displays. DARPA seeks to leap beyond incremental, evolutionary enhancement of head-mounted display technologies to a see-through contact lens on which images can be displayed. This information might be command-and-control information, not unlike information provided to players of first-person, shooter-type videogames or synthetic entities and effects in a live training environment.
But all kinds of questions remain — from manufacturing to power to wireless data transfer. Even basics, like which display technologies would be used, remain. Maybe lasers, DARPA suggests. Maybe light-emitting diodes. Or maybe something else entirely will give troops this videogame vision.
The materials behind real-life invisibility cloaks could even factor in, sorta. DARPA is talking about spending $3 million next year on "transparent displays" — and you’d certainly want your Halo 3-esque contacts to be transparent. The key to those displays would be "metamaterials," the strange substances that can bend certain frequencies of light around them.
As Jimmy points out in the comments, University of Washington researchers are already working on a similar gadget — a contact lens assembled with functional circuitry and LEDs.
Pop Mech reports:
Potential uses include virtual displays for pilots, videogame projections and telescopic vision for soldiers. A working prototype of a lens-embedded antenna that draws power for the device from radio frequencies has also been created. The next steps are to build a version that can display several pixels — and then to test it on a person.
The UW team uses a technique called self-assembly to manufacture the eyewear. Researchers dust a specially designed contact lens with microscale components that automatically bond to predetermined receptor sites. The shape of each component dictates where it attaches.
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