This may seem straight out of some science fiction book, from the likes of Isaac Asimov who wrote about distant planets, interstellar travel and unimaginable gizmos that do unimaginable things, at a time when the only creditable achievement made related to space travel was a successful journey to the moon and back. With Samsung’s recent patent, these unimaginable things can soon cease to exist and be a thing of the past. Samsung has been granted a patent for developing a contact lens that not only has an inbuilt camera for recording everything that a person sees, but also features a display that projects images directly into the wearer’s eyes. The camera and the projector, including all the sensors, are controlled by blinking.
With this news, the social media was rife with interesting comments. People are of the opinion that Samsung has apparently ‘bagged a million billion trillion dollar market with this’. Some even went to the extent of praising Samsung’s silent efforts – While Apple was busy making retina displays, Samsung decided to go for the real retina instead. Sorry Apple. Apple certainly has a lot of immediate thinking to do, if it has to come out with something as interesting or enviable than what Samsung is being lauded for.
Samsung had apparently started developing smart contact lenses to create a better augmented reality experience than what is currently offered through Google glass and similar wearables. This kind of a smart lens can allow the projection to be made directly into the person’s eyes instead of on a glass surface and be more invisible, and therefore undetectable, at the same time. Smart contact lenses for medical use, has been patented by Google in 2014, which analyses the tear fluid in the wearer’s eyes and determine their blood sugar levels.
