University of Washington Presents the Terminator’s Eye

Many SF movies actions have become reality, cloning for example.
Now it’s the special visual power of Terminator to become reality, in the shape of contact lens developed with latest generation technologies including manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales of lens with imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

During last years scientists have presented several real life applications of these contact lens and they talked about helping vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels, Internet surfing on the go, concluding with the fact that the material of which they would be built is flexible and biologically safe.

"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, the leader of a group developing the electronic parts for the contact lenses at the University of Washington. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising."



The demonstration took place at the international conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, where scientists have discussed about Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, subject initiated by Harvey Ho from at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California.

These extraordinary lenses would be used in virtual displays and pilots for example would see the speed of a vehicle projected on the windshield, or video game players would interact deeper with the virtual world with no motion range restrictions.

"People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about. Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it's safe," declared Parviz.

The lens in the picture is a prototype consisting of an electric circuit and red light emitting diodes and shows no side effects after being tested on rabbits for 20 minutes of wearing.
According to Parviz, this type of contact lenses are very similar with the existent ones and for development the team used flexible organic materials which are extremely delicate and hard to work with, as well as inorganic materials and toxic chemicals.
The metal layers used for building the circuits are just several nanometers thick and having a width of 1/1000 of human hair.
The constructed light emitting diodes measure only 1/3 of a millimeter.



Parviz also said that they are working to place different instruments on the large outside area of the transparent part of the eye, while the team is thinking in adding wireless communication and to power the lenses system with a mix of radio-frequency power and solar cells.
We are promised to have access to a basic display lenses model with a few pixels in the very near future.