'Videogame' Style Contact Lenses

Trend Hunter has covered bionic contact lenses before, but now the Pentagon wants in the game:

Today’s technology allows soldiers with advanced gear to see digital maps through helmet-mounted monocles and pilots to get information on heads-up displays. But the latest project from DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky science and technology division, will enable troops to see an info-“augmented” reality all around them, via contact lenses that provide “first-person shooter-type video game” environments.

The agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office announced that it’s looking for information on “the creation of micro- and nano-scale display technologies for the purpose of creating displays that could be worn as transparent contact lenses.”

If this seems too far-fectched or in the far-off future for you, they expect the technology to be ready in “three to five years.” 

The Pentagon release notes, “A limiting factor to un-tethered augmented and/or mixed reality applications is the bulkiness, power consumption, cost, limited resolution, and limited field of view of head-mounted displays.    DARPA seeks to leap beyond incremental, evolutionary enhancement of head-mounted display technologies to a see-through contact lens on which images can be displayed.    This information might be command-and-control information, not unlike information provided to players of first-person, shooter-type video games or synthetic entities and effects in a live training environment.”