A New Prototype Contact Lens To Stay Connected

Contact lenses with many features are no longer science fiction. A team of South Korean scientists has indeed developed a new prototype equipped with LED lenses that could display information directly and on our cornea. Find out what you may be in the near future.

Contact translucent lenses are not new: many use it on a daily basis to improve their eyesight, or just for aesthetic reasons. But scientific research has to go further with this technology. This is the case of a team of South Korean researchers from the National Institute of Science and Technology of Ulsan (UNIST) comes to design flexible contact lenses and equipped with LEDs.

One of the main issues concerning the transparent electrodes used in products such as mobile phone screens or those of television is that the material does not work if it is bent or simply folded. Hence it could not be used with contact lenses. Yet this successful team led by Jang- Ung Park made a lens composed of graphene layers alternating with layers of with others. Scientists have also shown that ILDED technology (inorganic LED diode) could easily fit on the surface of one of the lenses used in many applications, such as display pictures or videos directly in the eye.

For now, these contact lenses were tested on live rabbits which showed no sign of discomfort or irritation so far. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to have contact lenses that have the same functions as the eyes of the Terminator robot, the team of scientists said it is still far away. That said, we must not lose hope since the technology is constantly changing and this prototype lenses will certainly change a lot in the coming years. Sooner or later you could have the contents of a Smartphone directly in the eye.