Monday, February 16, 2015

Another Step Closer to the Six Million Dollar Man

From Science:
Wink your right eye to zoom in; wink your left eye to zoom out. Those are the operating instructions for a vision-enhancing system that could be a workaround for certain kinds of vision loss—or a futuristic upgrade to human sight. A new prototype of the technology, presented here today at the annual meeting of AAAS, relies on contact lenses (above) containing tiny aluminum telescopes that interact with a pair of eyeglasses to toggle between normal and 3x magnification. The telescopes were first developed with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding as superthin cameras for aerial drones.

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

I've never understood why wearing goggles isn't a thing.

People get so excited about stuff like this vision augmentation, but even though we've long had the technology to achieve this with external eyewear, trends and fashion seem to hold the notion back. We're just not interested in improving our visual capabilities until tech is good enough to make it super tiny and discrete, for some weird reason.

Honestly, if I wouldn't get constantly heckled for wearing them in public, I'd invest in a pair of comfortable goggles to wear permantently (like I already do with my eyeglasses) and just customize them for all sorts of things. A camera, a headlight, magnification, anti-glare, navigational HUD, anything I could.

And yet I don't, even though the tech is there, because the endless hassling I'd receive from society at large about them would make it unbearable. And that's the real pathetic thing about our species, in my mind - people are so hung up on appearances that we're disincentivized towards practicality. We're rather forgo a thousand clever conveniences than suffer the indignity of having to "look funny".