Last week, a new milestone was reached in augmented reality technology that highlights how far the field has come in recent decades. We had our first real test of a realistic compact contact lens.
It happened at a research lab at Mojo Vision in Saratoga, California, and wasn’t a rough test of bulky devices with dangling wires. No, this was a real test of AR contact lenses used directly on a real person’s eye for the first time.
It is very difficult to create an AR contact lens. Being able to fit a high-resolution screen into a tiny transparent lens is daunting, but it’s still the smallest piece of the puzzle..
The hardest part is that the tiny lens, which should fit snugly over the human eye, needs to connect wirelessly to external devices and be fully operational without any kind of physical connection. This is quite a challenge but that’s what Mojo Vision achieved in its latest offering.
Augmented reality technology in contact lenses
The display technology is also impressive. According to the company, the Mojo Lens has a 14,000 pixels per inch microLED display with a pixel pitch of 1.8 microns. For context, the iPhone 13 with a Super Retina XDR display has 460 pixels per inch. In other words, the Mojo Lens’s screen is 30 times the pixel density of the new iPhone.
Additionally, these lenses include an ARM processor with a 5GHz wireless transmitter, along with an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to track eye movements. And all this right in your eyes.
This is still not the hardest part. According to the company, the Mojo Lens includes medical-grade precision batteries. It’s unclear what the current battery life of the prototype is today, but according to Mojo, the product’s goal is power management that allows for all-day use.
future
Augmented reality will change society dramatically because it will transform digital assets from selectively accessed artifacts to ongoing features of our physical environment.
We expect this technology to evolve further in the coming years, to accompany the introduction of a lot of talk about the metaverse. We will witness a major shift in augmented reality technology in the coming years. We can risk saying that perhaps this technology is just a “crawl” at the moment.
