contact lenses

Telescopic contact lenses could give superhero vision

Many superheroes come equipped with special seeing abilities, like X-ray vision or night vision. Superman even sports telescopic vision, the ability to see over long distances. Researchers are working on a contact lens that bestows telescopic vision, though it won't let you spy on faraway planets.

The lens experiment came about through DARPA-funded research into vision enhancement devices for soldiers. What the researchers developed could become a solution for people suffering from age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness for older adults. The goal is to improve vision with an unobtrusive device.… Read more

Glasses and Glass: How Google Glass changed my face

I had two transformative yet very minor optical experiences last week, both kicking off in the space of 2 hours: I got contact lenses, and I began experimenting with Google Glass.

The two are interlinked, because I couldn't use Google's bleeding-edge wearable tech with my comfy Ray-Ban eyeglasses.

If I was going to use Glass, I'd need contacts.… Read more

The 404 991: Where we're trapped in a cube (podcast)

Steve "The Spherical Audiophiliac" Guttenberg makes his first 2012 appearance on the show this morning and adds some more descriptors to his middle name.

He brings in a few noise-canceling earbuds and headphones into the studio for a head-to-head, and we'll confer about which modern artists have the talent to stick around another 30 years.

Finally, we'll end the show with a talk about Paul McCartney pulling his tracks from Spotify! These stories and more on today's 404 Podcast.… Read more

Delivering anesthesia via contact lenses

Eye drops are so 1.0. Not only can they be messy and inconvenient to apply, they deliver medicine to treat dryness and other issues in imprecise volumes so quickly that they need to be reapplied every few hours.

And for those applying eye drops after laser eye surgery--when the eyes are especially tender--they can be a real pain.

Which is why researchers at the University of Florida are working to design contact lenses already helpful in protecting the eyes post-surgery that can extend the release time of anesthesia to help with this post-surgery pain.

The trick, chemist Anuj Chauhan … Read more

Gaga's Bad Romance video inspires bad eye trend

In a classic case of life imitating art, more and more girls around the world seem to be all gaga over circle contact lenses that make one's eyes look like an anime character on crack--a look now famously embraced by Lady Gaga in her music video Bad Romance (below).

This trend, described by The New York Times last week (one girl the paper interviewed owns and wears 22 pairs) and lamented by eye-care specialists across the news media, has the potential to scratch corneas and lead to a rise in eye infections and corneal ulcers that in turn could … Read more

Got glaucoma? Put a little vitamin E in your lens

The eye condition glaucoma, which afflicts some 67 million people and is second only to cataracts as the world's leading cause of blindness, is often treated with eye drops that relieve the unusually high pressure inside the eye.

Contact lenses with vitamin E, however, just might deliver more medication to treat glaucoma almost 100 times longer than current lenses, says Anuj Chauhan, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville who helmed the research team investigating this new treatment:

"The problem is within about 2 to 5 minutes of putting drops in the eye, tears … Read more

I wear my suncontacts at night

Photochromic lenses that allow you to walk from inside to outside without putting on UV-filtering lenses have been around for decades. But the technology is just making its way to contacts.

Traditionally, these light-to-dark lenses have been constructed by coating a normal lens with a photochromic dye. When UV light hits the dye, the individual molecules expand, darkening the lens and absorbing light. Coating contacts, however, doesn't work so well.

So researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have laced contacts with a matrix on nano tunnels filled with these photochromic dyes. Not only has the … Read more

Superhuman vision may be on the horizon

Contact lenses have traditionally been engineered to help the visually impaired see the world around them more clearly--to attain perfect, or close to perfect, vision.

But why not super vision? Why not a lens that could superimpose holographic driving control panels over a pilot's otherwise normal view? Enable Web surfing on the go? Provide a virtual world for gamers that covers their entire field of vision instead of just a plasma screen?

Engineers at the University of Washington have been asking just that as they manufacture first-gen versions of the bionic eye in the form of contact lenses with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

"Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision," writes Babak A. Parviz, an associate professor at UW who heads a multi-disciplinary group on electronics in contact lenses, in the September 2009 issue of IEEE's Spectrum. "To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs."… Read more