I'd like to see an attempt by the subject to work with an artist to draw what they experienced. I believe what we're seeing is external "takes" on what people subjectively think it looked like, not a subject-centric view.
Where the virtual field projects in 3-space. How it moves with head and eye movements, and focal shifts. What apparent pixel resolution it had, not the imputed DPI, the experiental effect of the actual pixelcount in the field.
Did it flicker. Did it rainbow.
Otherwise, Did it promote Nausea. Did it fail to blank when the eyelid was shut. Did it shut off, when wanted to be on.
Sounded like it was a static monochrome image and the 3D space stuff will come later. Do they even have an accelerometer or gyro in the device or does it pair with a phone or other device to get those readings? Are they even integrated into the software at this time. I suspect not.
> It's got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.
> you won't need hand controls, or a smartphone, or even Meta's crazy nerve-hijacking control inputs to control it – Mojo Vision has designed a hands-free user interface controlled by your own eye movements
if you place an image inside or on the eye surface, the brain will interpret it as being a some distance in the real visual field. where is that distance?
Call me skeptical, but looking at that photograph it looks nothing like something I want to put in my eyes.
This product is way too much of a moonshot - the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years.
There is a reason that all the research in contact lenses to date has been to make them as light and thin as possible.
Companies can't really make a standard contact lens that lasts more than a month without compromising on comfort and it sliding around your eyeball - so how we think they are going to solve that PLUS add a battery and a load of electronics and make it something people will actually want to wear is a mystery to me.
No doubt eventually this level of technology will come, but I can't see it coming in the timelines required for Mojo to be a commercial success (unless there is some other plan to commercialise the IP).
They have a functioning prototype. Who are you and why does your opinion matter? (I’m just sick of skepticism automatically being associated with intelligence).
I'm sympathetic to the skepticism overdose, but ultimately this is a fallacious appeal to authority. GP makes good points. Even the Google/Verily glucose contact lens didn't work out and this is an order of magnitude more complicated.
Do we really believe that the deal breaker for Google Glass was just that it made you look like a dork? Because that is the only problem the contact lens seems to solve, and it introduces a whole host of new problems. I'm not sure I feel great about putting a battery straight into my eyeball after seeing what they can do to cars and laptops when they fail.
If I remember well the backslash about Google Glass was the camera. People didn't want Glasses inside their shops or generally around them. A camera inside a phone that one has to explicitly point and shoot was and is OK. A kind of hidden camera was not.
Contact lenses solve a number of problems especially against headsets. They create others with the interference with vision correction devices but at least one could wear prescription glasses or sunglasses. BTW, I wore contact lenses for about 20 years, then suddenly couldn't wear them anymore and went back to glasses.
In my opinion, the contact lenses solve a whole lot of issues. Invisible to people around you, literally captures the entirety of your retina, no motion sickness, higher fidelity and did I mention completely invisible to everyone around you making uptake on this seamless.
Ok, let's diligence this, so our skepticism isn't unfounded:
>Invisible to people around you.
Except for the not-built body-wearable computer that will eventually run the things [0]
> literally captures the entirety of your retina
This prototype covers <20% of your field of vision [1]
>no motion sickness, higher fidelity
I think you're comparing this to headsets, but I can tell you from [1] that this is not 'high-fidelity' by any means (for one, it's monochrome and each pixel is binary on or off)
Another problem to think about:
A sunny day is c. 30k nits. From the looks of the photo, this display is maybe 100 nits. IT will be nearly impossible to see the display outdoors.
many many years ago i saw a nat geo "fighting documentary" where the guest (special forces something, ) had a eye tracker and a random person walk through a test course.
what they showed was the "special guest" was actively looking and investigating threats, checking surroundings and assessing everything. the random person was just "walking" without actually "looking" or "concentrating" on anything, .
"guest" was doing "this is a car, ok, next, this looks like a guy, wait what is in his hand,... is that an alleyway? no light, could someone be hiding in the shadow"
the random person's vision was like "lalalalaala.... end of test, what did i miss?"
That was a quite a big thing for me. i always "look" at things now, when i am walking, driving, something. it definitely gets tiring after a while because of the sensory overload.
Now, i cannot imagine what AR would do to that vision, would it be helpful, less helpful? i am not sure but it will be something to consider.
i'm not really sure. years ago natgeo used to do shows like that one time where two guys go and train various martial arts around the world, this must've been something similar in that line. i don't remember
edit: looks like "fight science" or "human weapon"
A 100 nits huge screen at a distance that covers 20% of my field of vision would be the same as a 100 nits tiny screen close to my eye that covers 20% of my field of vision.
Or to put it another way, things don't look dimmer just because they're further away. It's less total light because it covers less of my field of vision.
Fair point, I imagined nits was something like Lumen.
But I think it certainly matters, since nits indicate the amount of light (candles per square meter) hitting a board 1m from the source, if the board/eye is only 10mm away, the intensity in that spot is much higher.
That said, the area changes much more than the distance I think, so overal brightness is probably still not equivalent to 100 nits (at 1m).
> since nits indicate the amount of light (candles per square meter) hitting a board 1m from the source,
I think I can see how you've got here but that's not correct. It's about the light emitted per square meter of the source, not a measure of the light hitting a board some distance away.
Moving a screen closer doesn't make it more intense, because as you move closer it covers more of your vision. Total light increased, but not more intense.
I don't think the brightness changes with the distance. Take any screen (or any object). When you very the distance the color of it doesn't increase or decrease in intensity.
I don't disagree that those are the words, but the fact that the sample images are in a dim room is a huge red flag for me in terms of believing them.
Also don't forget that a lot of the crazy increases in brightness recently is just us learning you can run a ton of wattage through LEDs if you figure out heat dissipation. The 1 hour (non-rechargeable) battery life on these things likely means they are running very little power through the display (plus who wants anything even slightly warm on their eye?)
You know what contacts don’t solve? Shoving your finger into your eye, cleanliness and fatigue.
I stuck with glasses precisely because I didn’t want to deal with keeping contacts clean, shoving things in my eyes everyday, and retaining the ability to just pop them off and ignore the world.
I shouldn’t have been snarky.
You are free to like contacts.
But there are billions of people who wear glasses. We wear them for pretty much everything. We don’t care that we have glasses. But contacts make the technology “invisible” for “seamless uptake”?
Miniaturising things to contacts just sounds like they made everything at least an order of magnitude harder to achieve. Meanwhile they could have generated revenue from the glasses wearing population.
> They have a functioning prototype. Who are you and why does your opinion matter?
I'm allowed to share my opinion on here, it's an internet forum dude. Besides, I don't need a PhD to work out that I don't want to put that thing on my eyeball, or that some of the claims are pretty fantastical compared to the proof given.
If they put their prototype on Marques Brownlee or Linus and they said it was good then I would be inclined to believe it. But the CEO being the only wearer and then saying "wowowoww my product is so good this is amazing" isn't too convincing to me.
There are plenty of functional prototypes that never become a viable product. This, to me, has the smell of a company that won't be able to bring the product to fruition.
“I don’t like it”, which is what this comment can be summarized as, is a perfectly valid opinion. But it’s quite different from
“the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years” which is pure speculation and dismisses the entire news as.. a lie, I guess?
> “the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years” which is pure speculation and dismisses the entire news as.. a lie, I guess?
We shouldn't take what we read in a PR piece for granted. See:
And even some of the bigger failures like Theranos where the product was technologically infeasible from the start.
But with at least the three links I have listed - you can probably work out that they were infeasible by just applying common sense. A laser hot enough to easily burn through hair will probably burn your face, tiny artificial gills probably won't be able to keep up with human lungs, and we probably make roads out of tarmac and not glass for a reason.
IMO I think you can work out this is far away from a commercial product from similar logic - their prototype looks like something I wouldn't want to stick in my eye, their current battery can't last the day, and existing contact lens manufacturers can't make a comfortable lens that lasts over a month even without stuffing it with electronics.
Reducing op's post to your own summary, then attacking that summary, is not making a point in good faith.
Besides, it's not pure speculation, it's sitting on very solid foundations of reasoning that were outlined in the earlier post - Current cutting-edge tech for regular contact lenses has resulted in something (silicone hydro-gel) that lasts at best a month before it breaks down, but allows airflow through to the eye which is very important for long-term use and comfort. It's fair to be skeptical about overcoming this issue, which reasonably you would have to do if you're going to layer in some expensive tech and give a user a reasonable lifetime from the product.
Whatever tech could make these AR contacts comfortable to wear all day would be worth a fortune for plain old prescription contacts.
I’m willing, he’ll I’d be happy and excited, to be proven wrong here, but it seems to me that the balance of probability tips in favour of them having something half-baked and non-viable, and my eyes are definitely too precious to risk them on a bad v1 product
To be fair, AR contact lenses could more easily absorb a $10 premium on a material that is more comfortable for extended wear than regular contact lenses.
Yes, it would be good if contacts were more comfortable, but maybe it's a cost problem rather than a lack of capability.
The contacts are expensive, yes, but for a lot of people (myself included) they could still easily be sold at twice the price if material was more comfortable.
> I’m just sick of skepticism automatically being associated with intelligence
I remember being in the office on April 1st 2004 and seeing the front page of the first edition of the Evening Standard announcing how google were launching an email service to compete with hotmail which allowed upto 1GB of storage (hotmail was something like 2MB at the time).
I laughed at how a major newspaper had fallen for what was obviously an april fools joke. A day or two later I reflected that maybe I didn't know everything.
I don't think anyone had doubts about 1GB of storage being technically possible in 2004, the suprise was that they were offering 1GB of email storage for free. 1GB of storage was approx. $1 at the time Gmail was first offered.
Whereas I'm sceptical of the technical/practical feasibility here - more like if someone came along and told me they were going to bring consumer-grade jetpacks to the market that people could use for their daily commute I would be sceptical that they could bring that to market successfully for a variety of reasons other than price/commercials (e.g. safety). This is before we even start talking about getting FDA approval for sticking all this stuff into a contact lens (so they will need to presumably prove it doesn't increase the chance of conjunctivitis, corneal abrasions, and eye irritation). IMO it's quite clear from looking at the existing version that it would cause eye irritation - there is a big block sticking out the front.
LASIK is a one and done operation performed under the careful supervision of a doctor, and it has been tried and tested hundreds of thousands of times.
The probability of failure for this device is nonzero and and increases the longer you wear it. The failure modes are potentially disastrous, and there's likely no medical personnel nearby to intervene.
Anecdotal but lasik seriously messed with my dads eyesight for over a year. And he drove an OTR truck (at night quite a bit). Had he been aware how bad it was and that it only lasted 10 years or so he said he would have stuck to glasses.
I had lasik in 1999. I was legally blind (uncorrected) in my left eye, and needed a pretty serious correction in my right eye. After lasik, my vision was 20/15 (left) and 20/10 (right).
Now, in 2022, I still have no need of glasses, although I'd say my vision has degraded somewhat - still good enough to pass the driver exam uncorrected, however.
Night vision is objectively worse after lasik. Poorer light sensitivity, and for the first year, I had halos and starbursts around night light sources, especially when my eyes were tired/dry. This improved over time, however.
I'd do it all over again if I had to. I couldn't wear contacts anymore, they hurt my eyes, and I got used to navigating like a blind person when I didn't have my glasses, so lasik is a miraculous improvement.
When I looked into it a couple years ago, around 1% of procedures resulted in markedly diminished quality of life, with the most extreme cases regularly leading to the suicide of the patient, so I decided against it. Periodically I look back on the decision, and feel a great sense of relief. I count it among the best I have made.
My near-in sight was absolutely fine. Nowadays, it's getting harder to read near-in, but I think that's just age - I'm in my 50's now. I need good lighting to read the tiniest stuff like the voltage output printing on the average USB wall wart, for example. Otherwise, it's still quite good with no issues, no glasses needed.
my eye doctor told me not to bother because chances are as I get older my eyes will natural start to go long sighted, and that'll cancel out my shortsightedness. If I had LASIK I would definitely end up needing reading glasses...
Both my parents' eyesight have actually improved significantly recently. They don't really need glasses anymore.
But I can also confirm that my sister who had severe long-sightedness got her eyesight corrected with lasik. That was about 15 years ago, and there are no problems so far.
I'm extremely wary of putting high energy density chemicals into or near my eyes. Not unless there's a medical need or millions of hours of testing on other people first.
I assume the military is the first anticipated customer. Apparently they've been at it for seven years, presumably supported by military R&D contracts.
I'd wear a vibrator up my ass all day if that thing was made for me first instead of the company. The way things are right now, none of these AR/VR/AI/PA products will succeed, and if they do, it will be in a dystopian future.
Same I think its really skeptical that they have the economies of scale to produce ephemeral contact lenses that gets thrown out after a month.
Even an AR glass that looks natural and works well with changing focus is tough to pull off, it's puzzling why they would skip that and go into a almost guaranteed failure. AR contact lenses are still a good 20+ years away and even then it will be hard pressed for adoption because contact lenses aren't very popular and its obvious as to why.
That's not usually how technology development works - usually it's tiny steps in adjacent problems/products which suddenly coalesce into a new product, rather than working for 20 years solidly towards a single product.
Take VR as an example - A company that worked on VR since the 80's wouldn't have been unsuccessful, but the reason that the Quest 2 exists today is because of the smartphone, and the smartphone was built on the basis of large flash memory, mobile phones and laptops.
Or AirPods, which built on the foundation of over-ear bluetooth headphones and wired earbuds. Bluetooth over-ear headphones obviously built on the foundation of wired over-ear headphones.
NB: All of the technologies these built on the shoulders on were stable technologies which were generally received well in the market allowing continued investment in R&D. The closest thing this builds on is Google Glass or Magic Leap, both of which have been a commercial failure and are both a long way off a polished consumer product - and neither of those solve a lot of the technology issues here.
Google glasses moved the needle a bit but were found lacking.
This will build on the lessons of Google glasses and probably also be lacking, and people will keep trying and building on the lessons learnt and in 20 years we may get ubiquitous AR context lenses.
For a motorbike setup I'd imagine integrating into the visor of a helmet would be an easier option than a contact lenses. Is there anything a helmet-based option wouldn't provide?
I use my Apple Watch which displays large format directions during navigation and gives you a little tap on the wrist when you're nearing a turn. Works great for driving cars or motorcycles, riding bikes, and walking.
Interesting point. I actually find it annoying/redundant in the car, but never thought of the benefit if I were to use it during motorcycling! Thanks for the tip.
haha good point, perhaps a better solution is to have 2 separate helmets. One for track days (where 155MPH is legal) and one where i would need google maps xD
I have to say I appreciate their choice of green display. It has a lovely retro ASCII-terminal vibe that brings back memories of long hours in front of a terminal. Also ties into the films of that era (robocop-ish -- not sure that was green -- and even the Matrix).
My eyes are my most critical sensory input devices. I wouldn’t risk putting anything like this in direct contact with them all day. If your phone battery catches fire, you might get a nasty burn on the leg (assuming it was in a pant pocket), but this practically guarantees you lose your vision. If they can miniaturize it to this point, they can probably put it on glasses.
> a green monochrome MicroLED display measuring less than 0.5 mm (0.02 in) in diameter, with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch
So, that's 280px at the widest part of the display, and a total of ~62k pixels, right? There's a decent amount you can do with that, but I think even the demo picture in the PR shot's probably ambitious for the amount of data this can display.
This has got to be a contender for most-uselessly framed statistic ever. I considered they might do some fancy interpolation w/ the saccades of the eye to simulate a larger display, mimicking our eyes own tricks, but it doesn't seem that's possible if the display is saccading along with the rest of the eyeball? I'm also confused about what useful 'stabilizing' their sensors can do when the display only covers a small point in the center of the pupil.
"Much to my delight, I found I could interact with a compass to find my bearings, view images, and use an on-screen teleprompter to read a surprising but familiar quote."
It would seem difficult to view images or read a teleprompter via 4 pixels. More likely they mean exactly what they wrote - 0.02 inches at 14,000 pixels per inch.
Impressive. The usefulness of this kind of device is probably completely distinct from what you'd get with anything coming from Apple or Meta. Purely functional sight augmentation. Looks they're going for the sight-impaired market first, but I can imagine some uses in industry or military too.
> His comments on the experience were pretty succinct: "After completing preclinical testing and mitigating potential safety risks, I wore Mojo Lens," Perkins said in a blog post. "Much to my delight, I found I could interact with a compass to find my bearings, view images, and use an on-screen teleprompter to read a surprising but familiar quote. I experienced firsthand the future with Invisible Computing ... Wearing the lens was inspiring. Seeing the future literally put me at a loss for words."
So right now, he is able to see some stuff. That’s already quite impressive, but yes I think we’re far from AR
Augmented reality contact lenses feature prominently in the 2006 science fiction novel Rainbows End. The novel isn't really about the technical details of AR, but more about people living in a society in which they're able to construct mutually exclusive shared imaginary "realities", or belief circles. In some ways it predicts the divisions brought on by social networks. Also features artificial intelligence and other near future technologies.
It's written by Vernor Vinge, who wrote A Fire Upon the Deep, and its prequel A Deepness in the Sky.
I'd love to try this out, it'd be really fun. At the same time I think it's easily a decade out before it'd be far enough along to be worth trying a second time. Good to see we're testing the waters though, working towards things makes them appear faster than just waiting for them to be ready by happenstance.
I know the battery must be small and they say medical grade but I would be very worried putting any battery next to my eyeball. If some how you get knocked in the eye does it react? I guess if there was a medical reason to wear this I would consider it but just for fun I think I will wait until it’s shown some reliability.
Or if you could "see thru" the person you're talking to, by getting a face match, doing an interwebz search, and finding out the person is a fraudster. Real-time utility.
Does anyone know how they are doing lensing? I know smart phone senses are magic compared to what was possible twenty years ago, is this borrowing tech from there?)
(You can't just put a screen on your eyeball, you can't focus that close)
That's a sour grapes reaction if I've ever seen one. "Oh, those billionaires with their fancy yachts, you wouldn't catch me dead in one".
This tech is probably a couple of years away from being useful in very specific niches, and in all likelihood about a decade from regular street use. Until then, good luck getting your hands on one, let alone having it vie for your attention. And then... you can just not wear one.
I'm sorry for being a bit abrasive, but I've never understood this kind of negativity, and on HN of all places. Outdoor advertising is getting a huge slice of our attention, and we're worried about contact lens prototypes? Is this a cool tech forum or what?
This feels like tech skipping a step - I'm not sure how building a contact lens is possible, but building say, a pair of standard looking glasses is not.
I think this is right overall. Making an AR headset requires serious compute and power and there’s no way that will fit in a contact lens anytime soon. This demo is a HUD, which is much easier and already solved by glasses. So I think this tech is way early for practical use-cases.
On the other hand, AR glasses have some challenges of their own. Allowing the user to see through the lens and focus their eyes on the world around them while seamlessly displaying on top of it is a major engineering challenge which is mostly unsolved. Setting the distance between the display and the eye to zero and locking the display to the eye position makes this easier in several ways. It would solve the field of view issue. I just don’t see how you pull it off without having your eye connected to a puck by a fiber optic cable. I think you need several generations of improvements in semiconductor and display tech to fit everything in the contact lens, even if it’s just a wireless receiver and display for an image that’s rendered somewhere else. But it’s good that there’s people working on it to push the tech on the right direction.
assuming a wireless way of transmitting to the contact lens i'm not sure the value of putting all the compute in the lens vs having it external like say your mobile phone.
it's like bluetooth headphones, but for your monitor instead...
You still need a great deal of processing for the signal and image stabilization/readings from the sensors. This test version gets away with the M0 for that (well, as much as one can say that looking at the lens) because it only has ~61k of on/off pixels to make a HUD, which also doesn't need to be refreshed often just restabilized locally. Typical AR headsets get away with not having to deal with stabilizing eye movements, more place to stuff processing anyways, and no concern on being able to receive massive bandwidth video streams for more lively content.
Here's an idea for a AR device: It will be a wearable glass like Google Glass - it holds majority of the processors, sensors, battery and networking radio. This wearable can be built to very high quality today.
Now for overlaying AR content - Use a low power laser (mounted on the frame) to project on the retina directly. This is the harder unsolved tech.
Low power laser would project a monochrome image as in the contact lens device mentioned in the article. Eventually this laser could be replaced by a LED projector.
Then more compute has to be moved off the wearable. And bulkier wearable for bigger battery. Maybe the retina is sensitive enough for really low power lasers.
But contact lens seems more complex tho.
Also Google Glass probably had other problems, it was ahead of time. And it was not really AR, you had to focus on the image inside the glass or the outside world.
I know this is against HN rules, but what's up with all these comments who clearly have not made a minimal effort to read the article? It is a 600-word piece, not a research paper.
> this is all kept so extraordinarily slim and compact that you can stick it on your eyeball and still stretch your eyelid over top of it without the use of a shoehorn
Hard lenses are something like 1.5mm thick, plenty of space for modern electronics.
yesterday, I tried oculus quest 2 for the first time and I can tell you that we are really far away from having this in our daily life. I'm talking about decades.
I'm sure I'm not the target market - but: I don't want this. This technology has a use case, I'm sure. But it's not me. I want less distraction, less way for crappy social media companies to mine me. No thanks.
Where the virtual field projects in 3-space. How it moves with head and eye movements, and focal shifts. What apparent pixel resolution it had, not the imputed DPI, the experiental effect of the actual pixelcount in the field.
Did it flicker. Did it rainbow.
Otherwise, Did it promote Nausea. Did it fail to blank when the eyelid was shut. Did it shut off, when wanted to be on.