Have you ever heard of bionic contact lens. It's a kind of contact lens that has a display function. With such contact lens, vision like the photo on the right would become possible. It began as an experiment in 2008 by Babak Parviz, who created a prototype contact lens with a single red LED at the University of Washington in Seattle. These lens have control circuits, communication circuits, and tiny antennas that allow receiving and sending commands to external devices.
In recent years, these bionic contact lens has been transformed into devices for medical uses, such as monitoring the glucose levels of diabetes patients. In last year September, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne produced the first contact lens that could help improve the treatment for people with glaucoma.
Though nowadays the function for bionic contact lens are mainly for therapeutic treatment, scientists hope to expand the usage of this new technology. Already it is possible for this contact lens to show information in front of the cornea of the eye without jamming a person's vision of the surrounding; and developers are now hoping to extend this technology to aviators or video-gaming industry.
When I first know of this technology, my first impression was: what if it went short-circuit within my eyes? Or it exploded? Got a virtual virus? It sounds cool. Imagine looking at my friend and all his/her personal information would show up "virtually" beside him/her like a character in a video game. The article also mentioned the contact lens may be developed as a mapping device. If it is possible, then I shouldn't need a map nor any i-product anymore. I could walk around and pretend I know the place very well when in fact it would be the contact lens guiding my way.
It reminds me of the notion of "cyborg". Cyborg used to be a very vague term; and to create a bio-robot sounded impossible. But with modern technologies, cyborg seems like a near future. Already now there are light-beaming contact lens that could make people's eyes glow. What could be the other possibilities? To where is the extension of the mind? As Marshall McLuhan had said "Technology as extension of the human body"; or is it vice versa now? I have no conclusion for the endless possibility of the future.
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