Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight.
This article from the IEEE Spectrum web journal shows the prospects for accessing images into the eyeball from the surface of contact lenses, thus enabling pupils to overlay the scene they are viewing with notes, images and graphics from an e-learning or teacher source. To turn such a lens into a functional system, the system can integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens. These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful. Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens