There are some news items about eyes on the frontiers of technology that caught my eye. I suppose, like any pioneering outpost, some of these will be soon lost to history and some will flourish.
So consider Google Glass. While it has been making headway, there are already many competitors, which you can read about here and here and here.
For more serious medical purposes, there is the eSight system, which does for your eyes what hearing aids can do for your ears. The system modifies what its built-in camera sees so that it becomes clear enough and understandable enough for the low-vision, although not truly blind, user. (Here’s a video explaining the eSight system.) At nearly ten thousand dollars, of course, that user will also need some free cash or a generous health plan.
In what it describes as the next generation version of Google Glass, Neurowear makes products that read your mood and then adjust various things in your world, like the music you’ll hear. Their Neurocam senses what you find interesting and only records bits of that. There’s a video at http://youtu.be/CDgkX-JY_wM My guess is that this will have to be shrunk in size before anyone but flamboyant geeks would wear it, but who knows – Google may make geekwear fashionable.
But in case people feel awkward wearing geekwear, perhaps they just need to wait a few years. A team led by scientists at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens that is wirelessly connected to the Internet and has a built-in display. It’s being developed and tested on rabbits since there will be a big hurdle getting approvals to use this on humans, but something less obvious than glasses is bound to being created sooner or later.
© 2013 Norman Jacknis