These High-Tech Contact Lenses Can Zoom With a Simple Wink of an Eye

By: | June 3rd, 2019

Image credits: Eric Tremblay and Joe Ford. Courtesy of EPFL

Contact lenses have come a long way since they first came into picture decades back. Now scientists have taken them a step further by developing contact lenses that have telescopic abilities.

Lenses have a super thin telescope which is controlled via winking

These high tech contact lenses can let one zoom into things with just a wink of the eye. The telescopes are activated when the wearer winks with their right eye, and deactivated with a wink from left eye. But when the wearer blinks, the telescopes will neither activate nor deactivate.

Funded by DARPA, these lenses are developed by a team of international researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, the University of California, San Diego and partners at Paragon Vision Sciences, Innovega, and Pacific Sciences and Engineering.

Telescopic lens can one day help those who suffer from visual impairment

A ring of extremely thin mirrors that circle the center of contact lenses can magnify the vision 2.8 times, which is like seeing via binoculars. 

Prototype of the device was unveiled by EPFL’s Eric Tremblay at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Jose, California.

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

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