Curved LCD Paves Way for Augmented Reality Contact Lenses

From ExtremeTech:

The contact lens equipped with a head-up display has always seemed like one of the sci-fi gadgets most likely to become a reality. Today, The Centre of Microsystems Technology announced that it has developed a curved LCD that is able to be embedded into a contact lens, bringing us even closer to full-time, glasses-less augmented reality. If you're wondering why a curved LCD was chosen rather than embeddable LEDs, it's because the LCD option allows the use of the entire display, whereas an LED array can only use a small area of the surface. Jelle De Smet, the main researcher on the project, explains that even flexible liquid crystal displays are normally not designed to withstand the shaping process however, by using new kinds of conductive polymers they were able to create a spherical shape. Along with the larger display area, the team can change the pattern, number, and size of the pixels in the LCD. For example, if the team creates lenses using one large pixel per lens, they could change the pixels' shade, effectively creating lens-based sunglasses. If they instead decide to stuff as many pixels into the LCD as possible, then the lens could act as a detailed display.

Read the whole article and watch the video