Contact Lenses Could Soon Replace Our Phone Screens

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Walk down any street and it's a familiar scene: people craning their necks as they look at their phones. But in the not-too-distant future we'll probably just stare at digital information hovering over the world in front of us, taking in a blend of the digital and real worlds, all thanks to augmented reality.

In an ordinary office block in Saratoga, California, dozens of engineers are working to realize that future, churning out prototypes on a weekly basis of a smart contact lens stuffed with tiny circuits, batteries and one of the world's smallest displays.

When I visited Mojo Vision's office in July, I held its augmented reality smart contact lens about an inch in front of my eye to try out its features, shifting a cursor around the space in front of me by moving the lens. Since I couldn't wear the contact lens, I used a virtual reality headset to test its eye-tracking technology and demo apps, directing a small cursor by simply moving my eye. I could read from a digital teleprompter that displayed a series of words as I moved my eye, and I could also look around the room to see arrows pointing north and west, designed to help eventual users with navigation outdoors.

To “click” on one of the apps dotted around a circle that hovered in front of me, I simply looked at a small tab next to the app for an extra second. Numbers and text appeared in my upper field of view, showing, say, my cycling speed, or displaying the weather, or giving me information on an upcoming flight. To close the app, I'd look away from that information for a full second.

Technologists have talked for years about what the next computing platform will be, a decade after mobile devices replaced desktop computing as our primary gateway to the