For Your Eye Only

Newswise — An emerging generation of high-tech contact lenses will add images and meaning to ordinary vision. Tiny LEDs built into lenses will project images in front of users wearing the lenses, allowing them to see labels and text, as Arnold Schwarzenegger did in the Terminator movies, or navigational cues with arrows projected in front of them. Tiny biomedical sensors may sample the tear film on the eye to keep tabs on wearers' health. Small solar cells will harvest power to run the electronics built into each lense. Sounds too far-fetched to be true? Babak Parviz, a professor at the University of Washington, explains how he's building electronically enhanced contact lenses to bring this vision into reality.