Telescopic contact lenses could give superhero vision

By Amanda Kooser
 Many superheroes come equipped with special seeing abilities, like x-ray vision or night vision.

A front view of the switchable telescopic contact lens.
(Credit: Optics Express)

Superman even sports telescopic vision; the ability to see over long distances. Researchers are working on a contact lens that bestows telescopic vision, though it won't let you spy on faraway planets.

The lens experiment came about through research funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on vision-enhancement devices for soldiers. What the researchers developed could become a solution for people suffering from age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness for older adults. The goal is to improve vision with an unobtrusive device.

The contact lens can be switched between normal and telescopic vision. The researchers, from the University of California San Diego, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the Pacific Science & Engineering Group, published their work under the title "Switchable telescopic contact lens" in the Optics Expressjournal.

The lens, which is just over 1 millimetre thick, is equipped with tiny mirrors that act as magnifiers. "The magnified optical path incorporates a telescopic arrangement of positive and negative annular concentric reflectors to achieve 2.8x magnification on the eye, while light passing through a central clear aperture provides unmagnified vision," the researchers said.

The lens doesn't work on its own. It needs to be paired with a modified set of 3D television glasses. A polarising filter allows the switch between telescopic and regular vision. The researchers tested the experiment through computer modelling and by attaching a prototype lens to a optomechanical model eye.

The researchers aren't ready to pop this creation onto any real eyeballs just yet. There is still a lot of work to do with refining the technology and improving the image quality, but the work holds a lot of promise. "The ideal is really for magnifiers to become unnecessary," said co-author Eric Tremblay. Until we get there, however, contact lenses may provide a way to make AMD a little less debilitating."

The experimental contact lens on a model of an eye.
(Credit: Eric J Tremblay/Igor Stamenov/R Dirk Beer/Ashkan Arianpour/Joseph E Ford)

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