Speaker 1: How many years will it be until we're wearing augmented reality contact lenses? Well, we don't really have AR glasses yet, but I've seen the closest thing to contact lenses that display things, and it's made by a company called mojo vision. Here's my latest demo. Speaker 1: So I saw Mojo's technology back in 2020 before the pandemic. It was the last thing I saw at [00:00:30] CES, uh, in Las Vegas. And I went and took a look at this really wild display technology that had a tiny micro led display that I could peer at through a little lens that I held up to my eye. But the technology was not just meant to be held up to my eye. It's supposed to be weren't in your eye. Mojo's been working on this for years and now has a prototype that it's almost ready to start testing in eye internally. I did not wear it in my eye, but [00:01:00] I got to do the next thing, which was again, hold it up really close and take a look at what was new. So I took a look at this in New York city offices, and it was one of my first trips back in the city in a while. Speaker 1: So I'm wearing a mask and I'm taking a look at this lens and it's similar technology to what I saw before, but what's new is eye tracking. So this lens has not only a micro L E D display, which is about 250 by 250 pixels, according to mojo, but it also [00:01:30] has motion sensing technology, kind of similar to a smart watch. It's got an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a magnetometer for eye tracking. That's because it's sitting on your eye, usually eye tracking and VR and AR would use something like infrared, take a look at how your eye's moving. This is on your eye as it's moving. So it will calculate the distance through its motion sensors. Since I wasn't wearing it on my eye, what I had to do was lift my head up and, and move around to get a sense of it, not the [00:02:00] same thing. Speaker 1: So who knows how it'll feel in my eye, but that idea is pretty fascinating. And it's key to what the company is doing for how you control the contact lenses. There's a ring-like interface that will be used to look up and around and be able to bring up an app glance at it, activate it, have it come into your vision and then glance away to get rid of it. I got to try eye out basically very early prototype concepts of what apps might look like. So I got to look up [00:02:30] and take a look at a concept of a travel app where suddenly I saw an arriving Uber, or I got to look at plane seats and take a look at where I was sitting or my flight information. There was one where I glanced and I got to see a, a simulated at fitness readout to, you know, see what heart rate might look like popping up in my field of view, there was a teleprompter app, which, you know, brought little text that I could read. Speaker 1: And there were a couple of images I could look at to see how good the display quality was. As a little surprise. I got to see gro GU, which made me smile. [00:03:00] And gro GU always makes me smile. But the, you know, it's a monochrome green display with kind of a, a, a gray scale shading possibility, but images actually look really crisp despite being that low pixel count, um, from the way that I looked at it in my eye, certainly good enough to read and good enough to make out images. So this lens is not a product yet. If you look at mojo vision's timeline, this lens is the next in an iterative process. This [00:03:30] lens design, according to them does have the motion tracking capabilities. It also has tiny batteries, um, like the type that are in pacemaker, a little array of them and an ability to communicate wirelessly. Speaker 1: But this is not a standalone device. This is going to communicate short range to a neckband like processor. That's going to be able to communicate over a proprietary wireless technology based on five gigahertz, but very short range so that the, on [00:04:00] the contact lens doesn't wear out. And it doesn't overheat. Uh, the other thing that that does is move all the processing off the lens, except for a couple of power management things. So it's kind of like, that's a wearable display, and then you're getting the processor around your neck and it can interface with a phone, the long term goals to have not have that processor thing at all, but it's definitely there as an intermediary right now, the company is looking at possibilities for how this technology can be used, not only in [00:04:30] things like vision assistance, um, which was like an early demo. Speaker 1: I saw a couple of years ago that could outline objects and be able to enhance images, um, that would require some sort of camera technology as well, that would interface with the lens. But they're also looking at ways to work with fitness companies. There's already a partnership where certain fitness companies are already exploring maybe how the interface would work. Would it make sense for athletes? Uh, there's possibilities for things like training the company talks about how eye tracking similar to [00:05:00] how eye tracking or works in a lot of industrial applications could be used to pay attention to things like what, what your attention and focus is like, or even check for possible neurological conditions like a concussion. So all of that is speculative and possibilities down the road for research. And the, for next step is for the company to start actually wearing this lens, which should start happening according to them really soon. Speaker 1: So again, you know, I got to look at this eye tracking [00:05:30] display technology, is that augmented reality? It's not the same thing as, you know, casting 3d objects into the real world. Um, like when you wear, say a magic leap or, you know, Snapchat's glasses or any of the technology that we see coming soon, but it is a form of augmented reality in that it will display things that you could see while interacting with the real world. One app that I saw really did feel like AR which used the magnetometer to turn the world [00:06:00] into a compass. I was able to turn and see the compass read out, uh, tick off over the lens. As I turned around the room that kind of blew my mind because it showed me that really you're talking about a display and motion tracking. And the possibilities after that are really can go as far as the processing that you interface with that, um, and how it interacts with the world. Speaker 1: These lenses are made to be worn and then removed where they'll charge in their own little case wirelessly overnight [00:06:30] and, and disinfect. And then you keep wearing them again. At another point, I have so many questions for how this te G will actually work. Um, not only would I wanna see how the real eye tracking interface functions, which I only got to see again in this sort of turn my headway and with a prototype that they enabled using eye tracking VR with a vibe pro that simulated what the interface would feel like. There are a lot of unknowns and the come acknowledges this talking with, um, one [00:07:00] of their executive, Steve Sinclair. He was admitting that, you know, this is not a product yet. And that we're looking at something that is just in the early days of being tested. And certainly the pandemic factor into some of the delays I think on this too. Speaker 1: But I think that as we go forward and we start thinking where these displays are going, what is augmented reality? What is health tech? There are a lot of interesting ideas that mojo vision is exploring. I'm really curious how prescriptions will work, because [00:07:30] right now I've had a hard time even getting AR glasses to work with my really bad prescription. So if these could solve that and I could wear them, that's interesting. Am I comfortable with the idea of putting something with a lot of chips and you know, a tiny display and a battery in my eye? No, that freaks me out, but, uh, if it could really assist something and it was proven to be reliable, that's intriguing, there is no other technology that I've ever seen that does stuff like this. There are a couple of other companies, [00:08:00] including one called in with that is looking at the idea of other I embedable technology in contacts. Speaker 1: But this is the only demo that I've ever seen that has put a tiny display like this into something that's so small that you can put it into your eye. It's early steps for where this technology is going again. We still have to see AR glasses come to fruition, but mojo vision's idea is pretty wild. And I guess I'm taking a look at one next step after this, they said the [00:08:30] goal is to still get to prescription lenses and, and to cover that very large amount of tech on the lens into something like an artificial Iris, to have it blend in and not look quite as strange when wearing it. It's a hard contact lens and it's got a battery and it's got technology. So it is strange, but there are possibilities for heavens could be maybe of assistive use. Anyway, that's what I got to see so far. If you have comments, leave 'em below I'm Scott Stein. Thanks for [00:09:00] watching. And that's an early look at high end contact lenses with mini displays inside. They have mojo vision.