World’s first telescopic contact lens gives you Superman-like vision

An international team of researchers have created the first telescopic contact lens; a contact lens that, when it’s equipped, gives you the power to zoom your vision almost three times. Yes, this is the first ever example of a bionic eye that effectively gives you Superman-like eagle-eye vision.

As you can see in the photo above, the telescopic contact lens has two very distinct regions. The center of the lens allows light to pass straight through, providing normal vision. The outside edge, however, acts as a telescope capable of magnifying your sight by 2.8x. This is about the same as looking through a 100mm lens on a DSLR. For comparison, a pair of bird-watching binoculars might have a magnification of 15x. The examples shown in the image below give you a good idea of what a 2.8x optical zoom would look like in real life.

The main breakthrough is that this telescopic contact lens is just 1.17mm thick, allowing it to be comfortably worn. Other attempts at granting telescopic vision have included: a 4.4mm-thick contact lens (too thick for real-world use), telescopic spectacles (cumbersome and ugly), and most recently a telescopic lens implanted into the eye itself. The latter is currently the best option currently available, but it requires surgery and the image quality isn’t excellent.

To create a 1.17mm-thick telescope, the researchers — led by Joseph Ford of UCSD and Eric Tremblay of EPFL — had to be rather creative. The light that will be magnified enters the edge of the contact lens, is bounced around four times inside the lens using patterned aluminium mirrors, and then beamed to the edge of the retina at the back of your eyeball. The mirrors magnify the image 2.8 times, but also correct for chromatic aberration, resulting in a surprisingly high fidelity image. To switch between normal and telescopic vision, the central (normal, unmagnified) region of the contact lens has a polarizing filter in front of it — and then the wearer equips a pair of 3D TV spectacles. By switching the polarizing state of the spectacles (a pair of active, liquid crystal Samsung 3D specs in this case), the user can choose between normal and magnified vision.

In case you were wondering, these solutions all primarily exist for one reason: To help restore sight to people with age-related macular degeneration. AMD damages the high-resolution fovea at the center of the retina, but generally the low-resolution outer region (perifovea) still works. Without the fovea, people with AMD can’t make out fine details, such as type on a page. These telescopic spectacles, lenses, and implants focus light onto this outer region, giving people with AMD the ability to make out these details.

The current telescopic contact lens is made out of PMMA, a gas-impermeable polymer that old, uncomfortable contact lenses used to be made of. To bring their lens to market, the researchers will need to switch over to rigid gas permeable (RGP) polymers, which modern, comfortable contact lenses are made from. While these telescopic lenses are obviously intended for people who suffer from AMD, there’s nothing to prevent a healthy person from wearing them and achieving better-than-human (superhuman?) vision.

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6 Reasons Why Smartphones Won't Replace our minds

I noted that there's not much need tomemorize anything anymore. Ask a high-schooler today to rattle off the presidents, the periodic table or state capitals, and you'll get a blank stare—or a "Sure, let me grab my phone." Google is always available. And when's the last time you had to memorize a phone number?

But we'll never consult our phones foreverything. Some things are so important we'll have to commit them to memory even if we reach the age of universal digital retrieval. Here are a few of the life categories where memory will always beat digital lookups:

• The Frequency Factor: You access some details so often, memorization is required simply because the sheer quantity of lookups would make your life grind to a halt. Spelling, for example. Looking up every word—or directions to work each day or your school locker combination—would do a real number on your productivity.
   
• The Cultural Factor: You can't function for long in society without some basic grounding in history and culture. Without knowing these references you won't have the context to comprehend current events—or even know what you're missing or what questions to ask. You won't understand advertisements, editorials or even news articles. And you won't get anybody's jokes. You'll be unemployable and undatable.
   
• The Social Factor: You'll always have to know basic facts about your friends and family (and, of course, yourself). You should have instant access to your boss's name, your spouse's birthday and the names of your best friend's children. Fumbling to look them up electronically in a face-to-face situation would result in a lot of hurt feelings (and possibly unemployment).
   
• The Security Factor: Clearly, our gadgets can go a long way toward eliminating the need to memorize passwords. Programs like Dashlane and LastPass autofill our login information on the Web sites we visit, and even fill in our credit card information when we buy something online. But you still have to unlock those programs each day by entering a master password—one you'll have to memorize. That's true of physical security, too: you can automate parts of it, but at the end of the line, there's a physical key or card or fob. You have to know where to find it and how to use it.
   
• The Productivity Factor: Even if your daily work requires something you could easily look up, like molecular weights, stock symbols or commonly prescribed drugs, your work would bog down to a halt if you had to interrupt your flow every few minutes for a lookup. You need fluency in your own career facts to operate effectively.
   
• The Lookup Factor: Our gadgets may always be able to call up information on demand—but only if you know how and where to look for it. You still have to know how to use the tools of modern up-lookings: like Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com or—What's the other one? Oh, yeah—Google.
  
  

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