Wink to Zoom
Scleral contact lens plus smart spectacles equals 2.8 × magnification with a wink.
Currently, patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) don’t really have a lot of options once they start to lose their vision: their magnifying glass starts to become their closest companion as the disease progresses. But, a team of Swiss and US-based researchers have developed a telescopic contact lens that could help (1).
How? The lens itself contains a very thin reflective telescope encapsulated within a breathable scleral contact lens. The telescope magnifies vision by about 2.8 times, and has an annular structure with gaps between the mirrors and a clear central aperture. The regions that don’t contain mirrors have the ability to pass unmagnified light to the eye, and the result is a contact lens that creates two images.
Eric Tremblay, of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and one of the researchers explains: “We can switch between normal and magnified views with polarizing films that are placed on the contact lens, combined with liquid crystal glasses that align the polarization of light to one aperture of the contact lens or the other. This effectively acts as an electric shutter – changing the polarization of the liquid crystals switches the contact lens’ zoom.” The glasses also have another trick up their sleeve: a small light source detector that recognizes winks (and ignores blinks) – so winking is all that’s required to switch the glasses’ polarization and therefore the lens’ magnification.
- E Tremblay, “Smart glasses and telescopic contact lenses for macular degeneration”, Presentation at the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting, San Jose, CA, USA; February 13, 2015.
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