This startup wants to put a tiny display on a contact lens
12Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21067683/mojo-smart-contact-lens-augmented-reality-startup
Reported today in The Verge.
This startup wants to put a tiny display on a contact lens
A new Silicon Valley startup is trying to build the "world's first true smart contact lens," putting a screen right against your eye that can enhance your vision of the world. The startup, Mojo Vision, showed off a very early prototype in meetings at CES last week and is now ready to start talking about the product's development.
Mojo Vision hopes to first create a smart contact lens that can assist people with low vision by displaying enhanced overlays of the world - sharpening details or zooming in to help them see. But that reality seems to be a ways away. The prototype shown at CES included a green, monochromatic display that was wired to a large battery, and the company still needs to get FDA approval to eventually ship to consumers, particularly for its medical use cases.
Mojo's tech is built into a hard scleral lens, which has a bulbous portion that sits slightly above the surface of the eye. Mojo Vision claims to have a 14,000 ppi display (the iPhone 11 has a 326 ppi display, for comparison), as well as an image sensor, radio, and motion sensor that will be built in to help overlay and stabilize images. While Mojo showed off a lens that it says includes all those components, we didn't demo a fully working unit. The display technology seemingly worked when held close to the eye - we weren't allowed to insert it - but it required an external battery and processor to run. The company says people would have to disinfect their contacts nightly and that it'd recharge through a proprietary induction system.
As part of the demo, Mojo demonstrated how a display placed over a person's eye could help them see in the dark, especially if a person already has low vision. The demo relied