Innovega is designing contact lenses that could allow it’s users to have the same experiences offered by Google Glass, the Oculus Rift, an IMAX movie theater, and more. Unfortunately, you would still need to wear some sort of glasses in addition to the lenses. These contacts allow our eyes to focus on a screen that is only half an inch away, which is the main problem that Google Glass and the Oculus Rift have to overcome. By overcoming this limitation Innovega can make glasses with any sort of screen in them. They currently have prototypes with glanceable displays, like Google Glass, but with much higher resolution and screen space. A full view transparent display can also be projected onto the glasses to give a fully immersive augmented reality.

I’m interested in this because there seems to be few limitations to the type of hardware that can be made to work with the lenses. The contacts allow you to focus on images close up without much additional work on the screen or projector providing the image, and you can keep the close up image and the rest of the world in focus at the same time. It only needs simple hardware to project images for augmented reality. I think a logical next step is to modify this to allow for viewing movies or as a virtual reality system. This would provide a cheaper and smaller version of the Oculus Rift. Not to mention that the glasses you would wear in public for augmented reality would actually look like normal sunglasses.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57616459-76/augmented-reality-contact-lenses-to-be-human-ready-at-ces/
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/innovega-delivers-the-wearable-displays-that-science-fiction-promised
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/beyond-google-glass-innovega-shows-new-augmented-reality-prototype-ces/