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Three many years ago, the primary group of human subjects interacted with a mixed reality of real and virtual objects. They did this by climbing right into a large upper-body exoskeleton, pressing their face to a vision system hanging from the ceiling, and manually performing tasks that required them to interact each physical and simulated objects. They were testing a prototype augmented reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) generally known as the Virtual Fixtures platform. The hardware filled half a room and value nearly $1M, however it worked — showing for the primary time that AR could boost human performance in real-world tasks.
Last week, a crucial latest milestone was achieved in the sector of AR, and it highlights how far the technology has come during the last 30 years: the primary authentic test of an augmented reality contact lens. It was conducted in a research lab at Mojo Vision in Saratoga, California. No, it wasn’t a crude bench test of oversized hardware with wires dangling. This was a real test of an AR contact lens worn directly on the attention of a human subject for the very first time.
A wildly difficult engineering challenge
As someone who has been involved in AR from the early days, I want to focus on the importance of this latest milestone. Building a wearable augmented reality contact lens is a wildly difficult engineering challenge. When I say this, people normally ask concerning the display technology. Sure, the flexibility to place a high resolution display on a tiny transparent lens is difficult, however it’s not probably the most difficult piece of the puzzle. The harder issue is that this tiny lens, which needs to take a seat comfortably on the human eye, has to speak wirelessly with external devices and be fully powered and not using a physical tether of any kind. That is a frightening task, and yet it’s what Mojo Vision achieved of their latest demonstration.
We will look back on the years when people walked down the road, necks bent, staring down at little screens of their hands as an absurdly primitive method to interact with information.
Louis Rosenberg
According to Mojo Vision, the prototype lens includes medical grade micro-batteries. It’s unclear what the battery life is for the present prototype, but based on the corporate, their product goal is power management that allows all-day wear.
Of course, their display technology is impressive too. According to the corporate, the Mojo Lens has a 14,000 pixel-per-inch MicroLED display with a pixel pitch (the space between adjoining pixels) of 1.8 microns. For context, an iPhone 13 with a Super Retina XDR Display has 460 pixels per inch resolution. In other words, the Mojo Lens hardware has about 30 times the pixel density of a current iPhone. In addition, these lenses include an ARM processor with a 5GHz radio transmitter, together with an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to trace eye movements. And all of this sits directly on the human eye.
AR contact lenses are the long run
Still, a few years of development will likely be required to get from today’s prototypes to mass market consumer products that bring immersive AR capabilities to people all over the world. I predict that AR eyewear, first as glasses after which as contacts, will eventually replace the cell phone as our primary interface with digital content. Further, I consider augmented reality will completely change our relationship with information, transforming digital content from discrete artifacts we selectively access into seamless features of our physical world.
Just a few years ago, I wrote a futurist piece entitled “Metaverse 2030” that portrays what life will likely be like when AR contacts turn out to be commonplace — a world where mainstream consumers get fitted for brand new contacts each time they enroll for a mobile subscription. When that day comes, we are going to look back on the years when people walked down the road, necks bent, staring down at little screens of their hands as an absurdly primitive method to interact with information. Will this occur in the subsequent decade? Only time will tell, however the achievement from Mojo Vision takes us a big step closer.
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