Google's Smart Contact Lens | With an Integrated Camera

Google has invented a new smart contact lens with an integrated camera. The camera would be very small and sit near the edge of the contact lens so that it doesn’t obscure your vision. By virtue of being part of the contact lens. 

The camera would naturally follow your gaze, allowing for a huge range of awesome applications, from the basis of a bionic eye system for blind and visually impaired people, through to early warning systems, facial recognition, and telescopic and infrared/night vision.

This new smart contact lens would have a tiny CMOS camera sensor just below your pupil, control circuit, and some method of receiving power wirelessly. Because an imaging sensor, by definition, has to absorb light, it wouldn't be transparent , but it could probably be color matched to your iris, so that your eyes don’t look too freaky.

The lenses were developed in the Google X lab and were featured in a patent filing dating from 2012, which was recently published by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The patent filing features a contact lens that includes an embedded circuit, camera and sensor. 

The control circuit could be linked wirelessly or via a wire to the camera and sensor. The sensor could be a light sensor, pressure sensor, temperature sensor or electrical field sensor, which may allow for people to gain a "sixth sense" of sorts.

As you can probably imagine, there are some rather amazing applications if you have two cameras embedded in your contact lenses. You can’t do much in the way of image processing on the contact lens itself, but you could stream it to a nearby smartphone or head-mounted display (i.e. Google Glass), where a more powerful computer could perform all sorts of real-time magic. 

Google suggests that the cameras might warn you if there’s oncoming traffic at a crosswalk — useful for a normal-sighted person, but utterly invaluable for a blind or partially sighted person. For me, the more exciting possibilities include facial recognition (a la Terminator), and abilities that verge on the super or transhuman, such as being able to digitally zoom in and infrared thermal night vision.