It's difficult to be bothered with contact lenses when they help you see better all the time. I'm dubious people will wear them for something that will go on and off your face a lot like Augmented Reality glasses.
I think they'll appeal to a lot of people, but they're still going on and off a lot, and contact lenses with them -- I don't think that's going to be something that gets popular.
“The consumer’s got an extremely demanding specification, and we took that as something we needed to meet,” Willey said.
In other words, the company asked: how can we develop an AR device with good optics that is also lightweight, comfortable, looks cool, and don’t run out of battery constantly?
Innovega’s answer was a tiny screen and an even smaller lens.
Here’s how it works: a one-square-inch screen is attached to the inside of a pair of glasses, sitting about half an inch from the wearer’s face. At that distance, our eyes can’t naturally focus on the screen.
So Innovega developed a high-powered contact lens that adjusts the wearer’s vision so she can focus on objects extremely close to her face. This high-powered lens also corrects vision like a normal contact lens and can be worn with or without AR glasses.
The versatility of the system means it could also be used to view media projected directly onto the lenses of glasses, Willey said.
