Monday, December 19, 2011

LED mounted in a contact lens for possible virtual / augmented reality displays



Every so often, internet news aggregator sites run a story about a research group that put an LED into a contact lens, then inserted it into a rabbit's eye. I figured that I would try the same thing, but put the lens into my own eye. I accomplished this by laminating a coil of wire and an 0402 surface-mount LED between two ordinary soft contact lenses. I was hoping the lenses would stick to each other, but they did not, so I ended up fixing the edges together by pinching the plastic together with hot tweezers. This held well enough to capture a minute of video with the LED illuminated in my eye. For video purposes, I mounted the LED facing outward. An actual VR/AR display would have the LED facing inward.

I powered the LED by using a very primitive spark-gap transmitter built from a mechanical relay to send RF energy into a larger coil held near my eye. The large coil coupled the energy into the contact lens coil and pulsed the LED.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/single-pixel-contact-lens-display.html


http://www.cs.uic.edu/~kenyon/Papers/Soft%20Contact%20Search%20Coil.Vision%20Research.Kenyon.pdf
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17 comments:

  1. AnonymousDecember 19, 2011 at 4:57 AM

    Sir you are amazing.

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  2. AnonymousDecember 19, 2011 at 8:46 PM

    That Is Awesome Great Job!!!!

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  3. BeagleBreathDecember 20, 2011 at 3:23 PM

    This is a good start. Now you need to build me a holographic projector built into my contact lens'. The led is a good place to start your research from, but now you need to switch to quantum lasers. I would also suggest figuring out how to etch the miniture optics into the space between the surfaces of the contact lens. Finally, I don't want to pay more than $0.50 -Oh and I perfer the daily wears over the reusable contacts.

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  4. AnonymousDecember 21, 2011 at 2:22 AM

    That's useless, it's to heavy to keep in the center of eye itself and you can't see anything by this lens and one question: WHY? What you can do with this? Nothing, special. And how do you want to improve it using house tools ? :) Nice idea but that's all what you can do with this in your house, sorry :)

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  5. AnonymousDecember 21, 2011 at 4:57 AM

    "That's useless"

    Welcome to science ;)
    Lovely idea:)

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  6. AnonymousDecember 21, 2011 at 10:56 AM

    May want to check out the Colpitts Oscillator and a man by the name of Marin Soljacic. Nothing like an evanescent waveguide.

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  7. Taylor AlexanderDecember 21, 2011 at 12:52 PM

    Haha, you're hilarious Ben! :)

    I've got a Tesla Coil that might power the thing. It lights up a 4 foot fluorescent tube from 4 feet away. I'm nearby if you wanna try it.

    Also, I just saw a "How its made" on contact lenses. Its the first episode, on Netflix. You might have more luck casting the coil into a cylinder and then machining a new lens out of it. Its not too terribly involved - certainly not too much for you!

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  8. AnonymousDecember 22, 2011 at 2:11 AM

    ебанько

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  9. JohannesDecember 22, 2011 at 10:37 AM

    Very impressive, but I doubt I would ever try experiments like this on my own eyes - your eyesight is far to valuable to risk, I would say. Im still looking forward to future AR systems for (ordinary) human use :)

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  10. AnonymousDecember 22, 2011 at 11:11 AM

    mad russian dude Krasnow )) Mission impossible 2012 ))

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  11. AnonymousDecember 22, 2011 at 11:13 AM

    I'll be back

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  12. AnonymousDecember 27, 2011 at 1:20 PM

    could you give me the part number for the led?

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  13. Ben KrasnowDecember 27, 2011 at 6:26 PM

    Anonymous, the LED is Digi-Key part# 511-1653-1-ND with an mfr# SML-P11UTT86

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  14. AnonymousAugust 8, 2012 at 11:33 PM

    I wonder if a laser from a blueray could be used to fuse the two contacts lenses together by only melting the material close to their interface surfaces? It might be possible to fuse the two surfaces without making the outer surface so rough...

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  15. Robert LOctober 2, 2012 at 2:32 PM

    You could use a 0402 size capacitor to form a tuned circuit. Use RFID to power it.

    Measure the inductance of the coil and pick a capacitor value to tune to approximately 13.56Mhz (the frequency of most common RFID systems).

    The LED should illuminate whenever you are near to a source of RFID - eg. a subway, and NFC equipped cell-phone - a Skylanders Portal of Power.

    Keep up the good work!

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  16. Darcy ThomasDecember 4, 2012 at 12:36 PM

    I *think* that contact lenses are made of a semi acrylic type plastic. You may be able to make a jig to clamp the two lenses together with just the edges exposed. The with a cotton bud (Q-tip)wet the edge with some methyl chloride. This would cause the edge to dissolve slightly and fuse.

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  17. Solar Cell Phone ChargerAugust 7, 2014 at 10:50 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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