Superhuman Vision With Ioptik Contact Lenses

AT this years CES show in Las Vegas one product stood out to me amongst them all. The iOptik contact lens by Innovega.They describe themselves as a developer of transparent compact wearable HUD displays. They are in effect Transhumanism Eye Contacts.

Innovega’s mobile eyewear accessory will deliver the equivalent of a 240 inch, HD, 3D experience. Currently the glasses and lens wearers could view content from their mobile devices while still looking at the scenery around them.

Innovega was founded to solve a problem that is frustrating consumers:
The quality of digital media accessible by mobile devices is now exceeding the performance of conventional mobile displays. Consumers prefer big displays and are purchasing ever-larger flat-panel televisions and monitors.

CEO of Innovega Steve Willey added, “The display industry is working to fill this product gap by supplying head-worn, ‘virtual image’, glance-able displays. While these solutions are exciting, the small size of glance-able displays may fail to satisfy consumers’ desire for a truly high-performance, mobile display accessory. Innovega will provide to its strategic partners a 2nd generation, compact eyewear platform which fully deliver high performance media overlaid onto the wearers’ surroundings. By eliminating the usual magnifying optics from the eyewear and integrating them into a nano-tech contact lens, Innovega designers have been able to deliver high-performance imagery from compact and stylish eyewear.

 The Innovega eyewear system is thus comprised of two elements:
1) micro-projectors or flat-panels that are integrated into eyewear and provide a media gateway, and
2) novel iOptik contact lenses that deliver a crisp view of both near-eye rich media and of the environment.

The lenses are based on modern fabrication methods and can be worn in the usual fashion with or without the Innovega eyewear. When the eyewear is worn, any accessible media is instantly available and is overlaid onto or blended with the environment. An interesting benefit of the iOptik lenses is that they include the wearer’s prescription and therefore improve their normal view of their real-world surroundings.

Innovega believes that its new personal display interface will become an essential social media and entertainment accessory in the future for immersive 3D gaming, video, and of emerging high-performance AR which requires a see-through and panoramic wearable display interface. Additional uses would include persons with low vision issues of course and for Defense and covert ops through simulation and training as well as field operations for war fighters.

This technology is similar to up and coming Google glasses in that in it can project a 3d interface in air that you can then interface with your hands. I was reading on Mashable that the Pentagon has already ordered a supply from innovega and plans to use the technology to develop display screens akin to what Arnold Schwarzenegger's character wore in the movie Terminator.

The technology is supposed to be available to the public in 2014. I can't wait to get a pair for myself.