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Contact lens lets you feel the world with your eyeball the doomed of smartphones

Watching Videos, Chatting with Friends online possible only using contact lenses.

An Israeli professor has developed a tactile contact lens that translates images recorded on camera into tactile sensations on the cornea to allow the blind to "see" objects.


Professor Zeev Zalevsky, head of "Electro-Optics" in the faculty of engineering at Bar Ilan University has built a prototype that will physically press images onto the surface of the eye in order to help the brain understand through tactile feedback what the person is looking at.


The system takes data from a mounted camera or mobile phone and transmits the encoded image via the contact lens to the wearer's cornea. The tactile sensation can then be interpreted by the wearer's brain so that they can understand what they are looking at. Zalevsky describes the technique as much like learning to read Braille.

Zalevsky hasn't been able to test the contact lens on humans yet, because he hasn't yet received approval to go ahead with the clinical trial, but he has tested an alternative system that uses air pressure instead of direct stimulation on the cornea. This alternative system involved a pair of glasses which had a matrix of small air tubes directed towards the cornea. These tubes were injected with air in such a way that they formed different shapes, creating pressure on the cornea. The people trying the system were able to identify the shapes (admittedly only ten clearly defined icons) with 90 percent accuracy after a few minutes of practice.

"It was much simpler to get the approval for doing the pressure tests on the cornea because [blowing air onto the cornea] is already part of a conventional medical procedure to test for glaucoma," Zalevsky told Wired.co.uk. "For electrical stimulation of the eye you need more complicated regulatory approval, which will take some time."


The contact lens will have electrodes embedded into it which will act like small antennas for electromagnetic waves which will be transferred wirelessly from another device. The camera will capture the image, which will then be processed, compressed and encoded before being transmitted to the contact lens to generate tactile stimulation. Zalevsky suggests that this could be done at around ten frames per second.

The technique is a non-invasive, higher-resolution alternative to artificial retinas that use electrodes to directly stimulate the optic nerves. It will also work for those people who were born blind and so have not developed a visual cortex. In this case, stimulating the retina will not create images in the brain.

Zalevsky's technique is not without its resolution challenges however. Although the cornea is jam packed with nerve endings, it has a problem with two-point discrimination. This is the smallest spatial difference that a person can identify between two sources of stimulation, in this case on the cornea. Zalevsky's team discovered that the two-point discrimination of the cornea from a tactile point of view is less than a millimetre. This means there is a limit to how many pixels can be stimulated on the cornea. Having said that, the cornea is pretty large compared to the macula, which is what those developing bionic retinas have to play with.

Zalevsky believes the system could also be used by people who already see well but want to access supplementary information, in a Google Glass sort of way.

For the time being the focus of Zalevsky's spin-out company, IC Touch, is to raise funding to develop the prototype further and carry out the full clinical trial. "Then we can mature it into a product that will eventually benefit blind people around the world," he told us.

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