Walk down any street and it is a familiar scene — people craning their necks as they look at their phones.
In the not-too-distant future, we might likely just stare at digital information hovering over the world in front of us, taking in a blend of the digital and real worlds, all thanks to augmented reality.
In an ordinary office block in Saratoga, California, dozens of engineers are working to realize that future, churning out prototypes on a weekly basis of a smart contact lens stuffed with tiny circuits, batteries and one of the world’s smallest displays.
Illustration: Constance Chou
When I visited Mojo Vision’s office in July, I held its augmented reality smart contact lens about an inch in front of my eye to try out its features, shifting a cursor around the space in front of me by moving the lens.
Since I could not wear the contact lens, I used a virtual reality headset to test its eye-tracking technology and demo apps, directing a small cursor by simply moving my eye. I could read from a digital teleprompter that displayed a series of words as I moved my eye, and I could also look around the room to see arrows pointing north and west, designed to help eventual users with navigation outdoors.
To “click” on one of the apps dotted around a circle that hovered in front of me, I simply looked at a small tab next to the app for an extra second. Numbers and text appeared in my upper field of view, showing, for instance, my cycling speed, or displaying the weather, or giving me information on an upcoming flight. To close the app, I would look away from that information for a full second.
Technologists have talked for years about what the next computing platform might be, a decade after mobile devices replaced desktop computing as our primary gateway to the Internet. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is placing his bets on the metaverse, a fully immersive virtual world entered via a headset.
However, I think the bigger shift will be to augmented reality, where glasses or contact lenses display information on the world around us so we can see the online and real world at once.
If there is one thing that humans love doing — albeit badly in many cases — it is multitasking. Phones will become more like mini servers that coordinate all the different devices we are increasingly wearing on our bodies: earbuds, watches and soon eyewear, the latest piece in the puzzle of invisible computing.
Mojo Vision’s lenses are a marvel in engineering and perhaps one of the most ambitious hardware projects in Silicon Valley today. The company had to develop its own chemicals and plastic compounds that allow an eyeball to breathe through a lens covered with electronics. When I held the lens in my hand, it was noticeably thick, and large enough to extend beyond the iris to cover parts of the whites of the eyes.
“It’s not uncomfortable,” said David Hobbs, the startup’s senior director of product management, who has worn several prototypes.
The lens includes nine titanium batteries of the sort normally found in pacemakers, and a flexible circuit narrower than a human hair providing all the power and data. A slightly convex mirror bounces light off a tiny reflector, simulating the mechanics of a telescope, which magnifies the pixels that are packed into just two microns, or 0.002 millimeters.
From a few feet away, that tiny display looks like a pinprick of light, but when I looked through the lens more closely, I could watch a video of Baby Yoda, an image as crisp and engaging as any video I had seen on a screen.
I could imagine people watching TikTok videos on this one day, but Mojo Vision wants the lens to have practical uses.
The information it displays on your eye should be “very tight, fast, quick snippets,” said Steve Sinclair, senior vice president of product and marketing, who previously worked on the product team that developed the iPhone at Apple Inc.
Still, the company is figuring out “how much information is too much information,” Sinclair said.
For now, Mojo Vision is working on a lens for visually impaired people that shows glowing, digital edges overlaid on objects to make it easier to see those objects. It is also testing different interfaces with companies who make running, skiing and golfing apps for phones, for a new kind of hands-free display of activity.
Sinclair said that barring regulatory holdups, consumers would be able to buy a Mojo lens with a bespoke prescription in less than five years. That might be an ambitious time line considering that other augmented reality projects have been delayed or, like Google Glass, did not live up to the hype.
Google parent Alphabet Inc also failed to deliver a smart contact lens for medical use, but overall, big tech firms have been driving much of the development around virtual and augmented reality.
Apple is working on lightweight augmented-reality glasses which it plans to release later this decade. Sometime next year, it also is expected to launch a mixed-reality headset, which it showed to its board of directors in May.
Facebook currently dominates virtual-reality device sales with its Quest 2 headset, but it is also reportedly racing to launch its first augmented-reality glasses in 2024.
Why is augmented reality taking longer? Because it melds digital elements with physical objects in a view that is constantly moving. That is a complex task that requires a lot of processing power. Even so, our desire to keep at least one foot in the real world means we are likely to spend more time in augmented reality in the long run.
The big question is how to balance being present in real life while constantly seeing digital information. Today, it takes a few seconds to take out a phone, launch an app and carry out a task on its screen. In the future, we might be able to enter an app simply by looking at it for an extra second.
That will raise thorny issues regarding addiction and how we interact with the world around us.
That same question came up for Sinclair years ago when he was working on the iPhone, he said.
“I can’t say how we at Mojo are going to completely mitigate that, but the trend is moving in that direction, that people are going to have instant access to information,” he said.
Whether with contact lenses or glasses, the human eye will point to a world swimming in more digital information than ever before. Our brains will have a lot to get used to.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology, and a former Wall Street Journal and Forbes reporter. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
US President Donald Trump last week told reporters that he had signed about 12 letters to US trading partners, which were set to be sent out yesterday, levying unilateral tariff rates of up to 70 percent from Aug. 1. However, Trump did not say which countries the letters would be sent to, nor did he discuss the specific tariff rates, reports said. The news of the tariff letters came as Washington and Hanoi reached a trade deal earlier last week to cut tariffs on Vietnamese exports to the US to 20 percent from 46 percent, making it the first Asian country
On Monday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) delivered a welcome speech at the ILA-ASIL Asia-Pacific Research Forum, addressing more than 50 international law experts from more than 20 countries. With an aim to refute the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) claim to be the successor to the 1945 Chinese government and its assertion that China acquired sovereignty over Taiwan, Lin articulated three key legal positions in his speech: First, the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration were not legally binding instruments and thus had no legal effect for territorial disposition. All determinations must be based on the San Francisco Peace
As things heated up in the Middle East in early June, some in the Pentagon resisted American involvement in the Israel-Iran war because it would divert American attention and resources from the real challenge: China. This was exactly wrong. Rather, bombing Iran was the best thing that could have happened for America’s Asia policy. When it came to dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, “all options are on the table” had become an American mantra over the past two decades. But the more often US administration officials insisted that military force was in the cards, the less anyone believed it. After
During an impromptu Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) rally on Tuesday last week to protest what the party called the unfairness of the judicial system, a young TPP supporter said that if Taiwan goes to war, he would “surrender to the [Chinese] People’s Liberation Army [PLA] with unyielding determination.” The rally was held after former Taipei deputy mayor Pong Cheng-sheng’s (彭振聲) wife took her life prior to Pong’s appearance in court to testify in the Core Pacific corruption case involving former Taipei mayor and TPP chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲). The TPP supporter said President William Lai (賴清德) was leading them to die on
RSS