Scientists unveil Mission Impossible 4-inspired smart contact lenses
Chinese scientists have developed a new type of lens that can be used for health care and augmented reality (AR). Based on radio frequency, the eye-tracking smart content lenses don’t require battery or conventional silicon chips and are biocompatible and imperceptible.
Set to be used for human-machine interaction (HMI), the smart contact lenses rely on tracking eye movements. The lenses use methods like pupil center corneal reflection and electrooculography (EOG) to track eye movements.
Researchers stressed that contact lenses are the ultimate form of AR and many science fiction works have depicted the seamless integration of the virtual world and the real world through contact lenses.
“Mission Impossible 4 proposed a smart contact lens with a facial recognition function,” Prof. Fei Xu, one of the co-authors of the study, told Tech Xplore. “If small contact lenses can achieve a seamless combination of the virtual and real worlds, it will be the ultimate form of AR technology. The human-computer interaction technology based on eye tracking is one of the more important components.”
Miniature, imperceptible, and biocompatible smart contact lens
Researchers’ methods have shown initial success but these lack accuracy. Also, EOG poses a risk to the skin as it uses skin electrodes for collecting data.
Published in Nature Communications, the study’s eye-tracking techniques enable high-efficient, natural, and effortless human-machine interaction by detecting users’ eye movements and decoding their attention and intentions. Here, a miniature, imperceptible, and biocompatible smart contact lens is proposed for in situ eye tracking and wireless eye-machine interaction.
Employing the frequency encoding strategy, the chip-free and battery-free lens successes in detecting eye movement and closure. Using a time-sequential eye tracking algorithm, the lens has a great angular accuracy of <0.5°, which is even less than the vision range of the central fovea, the densest area of cones in the retina.
“With the development of optoelectronic technology and the improvement of the flexible integration of optoelectronic devices, contact lenses will realize more and more functions in human-computer interaction and medical health,” explained Xu.
The launch of Apple Vision Pro also inspired scientists to explore the potential applications of computer and human interaction using the eyes.
Researchers used a frequency-encoding approach for the development of smart contact lenses. It involved encoding information about eye movements into radio frequency signals.
The strategy helps to accurately track eye movements without the help of batteries or conventional silicon chips. It also made the lenses more lightweight, compact, safe and biocompatible.
Lenses can be worn for up to 12 hours
It also eliminated the possibility of leakage of iris and other biometric information.
Source: Interesting Engineering
Pig kidney ‘xenotransplant’ patient dies two months later
Scientists unveil Mission Impossible 4-inspired smart contact lenses