CEO test-drives Mojo Vision's smart augmented reality contact lens
newatlas.com
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Where the virtual field projects in 3-space. How it moves with head and eye movements, and focal shifts. What apparent pixel resolution it had, not the imputed DPI, the experiental effect of the actual pixelcount in the field.
Did it flicker. Did it rainbow.
Otherwise, Did it promote Nausea. Did it fail to blank when the eyelid was shut. Did it shut off, when wanted to be on.
> It's got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.
> you won't need hand controls, or a smartphone, or even Meta's crazy nerve-hijacking control inputs to control it – Mojo Vision has designed a hands-free user interface controlled by your own eye movements
This product is way too much of a moonshot - the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years.
There is a reason that all the research in contact lenses to date has been to make them as light and thin as possible.
Companies can't really make a standard contact lens that lasts more than a month without compromising on comfort and it sliding around your eyeball - so how we think they are going to solve that PLUS add a battery and a load of electronics and make it something people will actually want to wear is a mystery to me.
No doubt eventually this level of technology will come, but I can't see it coming in the timelines required for Mojo to be a commercial success (unless there is some other plan to commercialise the IP).
The probability of failure for this device is nonzero and and increases the longer you wear it. The failure modes are potentially disastrous, and there's likely no medical personnel nearby to intervene.
Now, in 2022, I still have no need of glasses, although I'd say my vision has degraded somewhat - still good enough to pass the driver exam uncorrected, however.
Night vision is objectively worse after lasik. Poorer light sensitivity, and for the first year, I had halos and starbursts around night light sources, especially when my eyes were tired/dry. This improved over time, however.
I'd do it all over again if I had to. I couldn't wear contacts anymore, they hurt my eyes, and I got used to navigating like a blind person when I didn't have my glasses, so lasik is a miraculous improvement.
For sure you all are going to have a conversation about reading glasses when you turn 40.
Both my parents' eyesight have actually improved significantly recently. They don't really need glasses anymore.
But I can also confirm that my sister who had severe long-sightedness got her eyesight corrected with lasik. That was about 15 years ago, and there are no problems so far.
Do we really believe that the deal breaker for Google Glass was just that it made you look like a dork? Because that is the only problem the contact lens seems to solve, and it introduces a whole host of new problems. I'm not sure I feel great about putting a battery straight into my eyeball after seeing what they can do to cars and laptops when they fail.
Not based on the PR photo. It would be very obvious to anyone who makes eye contact with you.
>Invisible to people around you.
Except for the not-built body-wearable computer that will eventually run the things [0]
> literally captures the entirety of your retina
This prototype covers <20% of your field of vision [1]
>no motion sickness, higher fidelity
I think you're comparing this to headsets, but I can tell you from [1] that this is not 'high-fidelity' by any means (for one, it's monochrome and each pixel is binary on or off)
Another problem to think about:
A sunny day is c. 30k nits. From the looks of the photo, this display is maybe 100 nits. IT will be nearly impossible to see the display outdoors.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzVAMRe3kmA - [1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/30/mojo-vision-reveals-the-w...
There’s probably something to be said for having 100 nits right on your eyeball.
Perhaps not materially so given the small relative difference.
A 100 nits huge screen at a distance that covers 20% of my field of vision would be the same as a 100 nits tiny screen close to my eye that covers 20% of my field of vision.
Or to put it another way, things don't look dimmer just because they're further away. It's less total light because it covers less of my field of vision.
But I think it certainly matters, since nits indicate the amount of light (candles per square meter) hitting a board 1m from the source, if the board/eye is only 10mm away, the intensity in that spot is much higher.
That said, the area changes much more than the distance I think, so overal brightness is probably still not equivalent to 100 nits (at 1m).
I think I can see how you've got here but that's not correct. It's about the light emitted per square meter of the source, not a measure of the light hitting a board some distance away.
Moving a screen closer doesn't make it more intense, because as you move closer it covers more of your vision. Total light increased, but not more intense.
"guest" was doing "this is a car, ok, next, this looks like a guy, wait what is in his hand,... is that an alleyway? no light, could someone be hiding in the shadow"
the random person's vision was like "lalalalaala.... end of test, what did i miss?"
That was a quite a big thing for me. i always "look" at things now, when i am walking, driving, something. it definitely gets tiring after a while because of the sensory overload. Now, i cannot imagine what AR would do to that vision, would it be helpful, less helpful? i am not sure but it will be something to consider.
edit: looks like "fight science" or "human weapon"
> MicroLEDs use 10% of the power of current LCD displays, and they have five to 10 times higher brightness than OLEDs
Also don't forget that a lot of the crazy increases in brightness recently is just us learning you can run a ton of wattage through LEDs if you figure out heat dissipation. The 1 hour (non-rechargeable) battery life on these things likely means they are running very little power through the display (plus who wants anything even slightly warm on their eye?)
I stuck with glasses precisely because I didn’t want to deal with keeping contacts clean, shoving things in my eyes everyday, and retaining the ability to just pop them off and ignore the world.
Liking contacts is a very reasonable prerequisite. I've had no trouble with my contacts for the last 20 years.
But there are billions of people who wear glasses. We wear them for pretty much everything. We don’t care that we have glasses. But contacts make the technology “invisible” for “seamless uptake”?
Miniaturising things to contacts just sounds like they made everything at least an order of magnitude harder to achieve. Meanwhile they could have generated revenue from the glasses wearing population.
Contact lenses solve a number of problems especially against headsets. They create others with the interference with vision correction devices but at least one could wear prescription glasses or sunglasses. BTW, I wore contact lenses for about 20 years, then suddenly couldn't wear them anymore and went back to glasses.
I’m willing, he’ll I’d be happy and excited, to be proven wrong here, but it seems to me that the balance of probability tips in favour of them having something half-baked and non-viable, and my eyes are definitely too precious to risk them on a bad v1 product
Yes, it would be good if contacts were more comfortable, but maybe it's a cost problem rather than a lack of capability.
I'm allowed to share my opinion on here, it's an internet forum dude. Besides, I don't need a PhD to work out that I don't want to put that thing on my eyeball, or that some of the claims are pretty fantastical compared to the proof given.
If they put their prototype on Marques Brownlee or Linus and they said it was good then I would be inclined to believe it. But the CEO being the only wearer and then saying "wowowoww my product is so good this is amazing" isn't too convincing to me.
There are plenty of functional prototypes that never become a viable product. This, to me, has the smell of a company that won't be able to bring the product to fruition.
“the product is nowhere near ready for consumers, the technology doesn't appear to be there, and I can't imagine them being able to release anything other than a tech demo for many years” which is pure speculation and dismisses the entire news as.. a lie, I guess?
Besides, it's not pure speculation, it's sitting on very solid foundations of reasoning that were outlined in the earlier post - Current cutting-edge tech for regular contact lenses has resulted in something (silicone hydro-gel) that lasts at best a month before it breaks down, but allows airflow through to the eye which is very important for long-term use and comfort. It's fair to be skeptical about overcoming this issue, which reasonably you would have to do if you're going to layer in some expensive tech and give a user a reasonable lifetime from the product.
We shouldn't take what we read in a PR piece for granted. See:
https://swimswam.com/artificial-gills-breath-underwater-like...
https://wccftech.com/skarp-laser-razor/
https://greenerideal.com/news/vehicles/0627-solar-powered-ro...
And even some of the bigger failures like Theranos where the product was technologically infeasible from the start.
But with at least the three links I have listed - you can probably work out that they were infeasible by just applying common sense. A laser hot enough to easily burn through hair will probably burn your face, tiny artificial gills probably won't be able to keep up with human lungs, and we probably make roads out of tarmac and not glass for a reason.
IMO I think you can work out this is far away from a commercial product from similar logic - their prototype looks like something I wouldn't want to stick in my eye, their current battery can't last the day, and existing contact lens manufacturers can't make a comfortable lens that lasts over a month even without stuffing it with electronics.
I remember being in the office on April 1st 2004 and seeing the front page of the first edition of the Evening Standard announcing how google were launching an email service to compete with hotmail which allowed upto 1GB of storage (hotmail was something like 2MB at the time).
I laughed at how a major newspaper had fallen for what was obviously an april fools joke. A day or two later I reflected that maybe I didn't know everything.
Whereas I'm sceptical of the technical/practical feasibility here - more like if someone came along and told me they were going to bring consumer-grade jetpacks to the market that people could use for their daily commute I would be sceptical that they could bring that to market successfully for a variety of reasons other than price/commercials (e.g. safety). This is before we even start talking about getting FDA approval for sticking all this stuff into a contact lens (so they will need to presumably prove it doesn't increase the chance of conjunctivitis, corneal abrasions, and eye irritation). IMO it's quite clear from looking at the existing version that it would cause eye irritation - there is a big block sticking out the front.
What the hell?
Even an AR glass that looks natural and works well with changing focus is tough to pull off, it's puzzling why they would skip that and go into a almost guaranteed failure. AR contact lenses are still a good 20+ years away and even then it will be hard pressed for adoption because contact lenses aren't very popular and its obvious as to why.
And it’s things like this that will let us get there in that timeframe.
Google glasses moved the needle a bit but were found lacking.
This will build on the lessons of Google glasses and probably also be lacking, and people will keep trying and building on the lessons learnt and in 20 years we may get ubiquitous AR context lenses.
Take VR as an example - A company that worked on VR since the 80's wouldn't have been unsuccessful, but the reason that the Quest 2 exists today is because of the smartphone, and the smartphone was built on the basis of large flash memory, mobile phones and laptops.
Or AirPods, which built on the foundation of over-ear bluetooth headphones and wired earbuds. Bluetooth over-ear headphones obviously built on the foundation of wired over-ear headphones.
NB: All of the technologies these built on the shoulders on were stable technologies which were generally received well in the market allowing continued investment in R&D. The closest thing this builds on is Google Glass or Magic Leap, both of which have been a commercial failure and are both a long way off a polished consumer product - and neither of those solve a lot of the technology issues here.
My mom’s worn the same (hard) contacts for decades.
So that part of it is sorted.
Well, they could hardly wear it up someone else's.
How does it deal with the eye shifting focus? Would you have to unfocus your eyes to be able to see it? That'd probably be uncomfortable.
Right now the options are 1) Mount an arm to the handlebar and risk my phone detaching or breaking in a crash
2) phone is in my pocket so I can hear instructions, but not see the screen.
having my phone in my jacket pocket, but transmitting to my contact lens would be pretty great.
Vibration on motorcycles is significant.
I'm not going to trust my brain at 155MPH to a "move fast and break things" kind of startup.
So, that's 280px at the widest part of the display, and a total of ~62k pixels, right? There's a decent amount you can do with that, but I think even the demo picture in the PR shot's probably ambitious for the amount of data this can display.
0.02 in * 0.02 in == 0.0004 sq in
0.0004 sq in * 14000 ppi == 5.6 pixelsπ(.02/2)^2 * 14000 = 4.4
It would seem difficult to view images or read a teleprompter via 4 pixels. More likely they mean exactly what they wrote - 0.02 inches at 14,000 pixels per inch.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scleral_lens
Mojo’s lenses do have a scleral design which makes sense, it’s one of the more comfortable hard contact designs (though quite invasive).
So right now, he is able to see some stuff. That’s already quite impressive, but yes I think we’re far from AR
It's written by Vernor Vinge, who wrote A Fire Upon the Deep, and its prequel A Deepness in the Sky.
(You can't just put a screen on your eyeball, you can't focus that close)
I already have enough devices vying for my attention. When I go outside it's one of the very chances I have to get a break from the attention economy.
This tech is probably a couple of years away from being useful in very specific niches, and in all likelihood about a decade from regular street use. Until then, good luck getting your hands on one, let alone having it vie for your attention. And then... you can just not wear one.
I'm sorry for being a bit abrasive, but I've never understood this kind of negativity, and on HN of all places. Outdoor advertising is getting a huge slice of our attention, and we're worried about contact lens prototypes? Is this a cool tech forum or what?
On the other hand, AR glasses have some challenges of their own. Allowing the user to see through the lens and focus their eyes on the world around them while seamlessly displaying on top of it is a major engineering challenge which is mostly unsolved. Setting the distance between the display and the eye to zero and locking the display to the eye position makes this easier in several ways. It would solve the field of view issue. I just don’t see how you pull it off without having your eye connected to a puck by a fiber optic cable. I think you need several generations of improvements in semiconductor and display tech to fit everything in the contact lens, even if it’s just a wireless receiver and display for an image that’s rendered somewhere else. But it’s good that there’s people working on it to push the tech on the right direction.
it's like bluetooth headphones, but for your monitor instead...
Uh-oh. No it won't. This is dead.
Now for overlaying AR content - Use a low power laser (mounted on the frame) to project on the retina directly. This is the harder unsolved tech.
Low power laser would project a monochrome image as in the contact lens device mentioned in the article. Eventually this laser could be replaced by a LED projector.
Even very weak lasers are probably not good to shine all day into an eye.
Also Google Glass probably had other problems, it was ahead of time. And it was not really AR, you had to focus on the image inside the glass or the outside world.
> this is all kept so extraordinarily slim and compact that you can stick it on your eyeball and still stretch your eyelid over top of it without the use of a shoehorn
Hard lenses are something like 1.5mm thick, plenty of space for modern electronics.
~ JC Denton