Contact lenses that display information to the wearer’s eyes have moved a step closer thanks to a recent research project.

Engineers from the US and Finland have tested a wireless contact lens featuring a working LED light on a living eye for the first time.

Although the proof-of-concept device only contained a single pixel, it could pave the way for lenses that display emails and text messages directly to the wearer’s eyes or provide real-time health monitoring information such as glucose levels.
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The lens - developed by researchers at the University of Washington and Aalto University - consists of an antenna that receives power in the form of radio waves, an integrated circuit to store the energy and a transparent sapphire chip containing a single blue LED.

One of the key challenges in developing the lens was finding a way to allow the eye to focus on a display so close to it. The human eye cannot resolve images closer than a few centimetres so a contact lens display would normally appear blurry.

University of Washington researcher Prof Babak Praviz told The Engineer that this problem was overcome using Fresnel lenses - very thin lenses that effectively consist of a series of prisms […]