What Does the Future of Augmented Reality Contact Lenses Look Like?

While Apple is still rumored to be launching its first Augmented Reality (AR) smart glasses in the next couple of years, top-tier tech companies and promising startups such as Microsoft, Lenovo, Nreal, and others are investing in bringing AR smartglass to the masses. Mojo Vision, a Californian tech startup established in 2015, recently presented a prototype of its smart contact lenses, Mojo Lens, at CES 2020. These contact lenses include a built-in display in the form factor of a standard contact lens. The Mojo Lens display is built with 14k pixels per inch MicroLED technology, which consumes 10% of the power of current LCD displays and is five to ten times brighter than Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) displays.  Also, the dimensions of the display are small (0.018 inch), so it doesn’t block users’ real-world view. Apart from high-tech displays, the contact lenses employ other technologies such as image sensors for computer vision, motion sensors for eye-tracking and image stabilization, and wireless radio to connect to external devices. Regarding applications, the intent is to begin as a medical product, empowering people suffering from low vision by providing improved overlays of the world and sharpening details; additionally, Mojo Lens smart contact lenses are suitable for enterprise and consumer use cases with information overlays about performing tasks or showing navigation, alerts, and other notifications.

Mojo Lens is not a commercially available product and is still under development and the Food and Drug and Administration (FDA) approval process, with some hardware details about Field of View (FoV), battery life and charging, and processing capabilities not yet revealed.

Mojo Lens is a product that is able to address some of the issues that AR smartglasses face today; however, it is also a controversial product that generates a lot of questions about safety, suitability, privacy, and potential applications. More specifically, smart contact lenses is a product category that has the potential to bring AR to the masses, allowing daily usage because it has zero extra weight, is (nearly) invisible, and is socially acceptable compared to AR smartglasses, which are bulky and may include embedded cameras. Additionally, it supports 100% hands-free access to information, which is ideal during activities such as driving, sports, and cooking and numerous enterprise applications that just require access to data but not interaction with digital elements. Mojo Lens and other similar products will not support spatial tracking/understanding like Mixed Reality (MR) devices do, in order to overlay digital content in real dimensions and allow interaction; the lack of sensors and processing in the form factor is understandable.

User privacy and data security are also among the most crucial issues related to AR smartglasses and systems that track users’ eyes and focus. A huge percentage of users will hesitate to insert a device that captures crucial data—from health status to detailed records of daily tasks, activities and emotions—into their eyes. Moreover, battery life, performance, user safety, and the hygiene of the lenses is another challenge; complex AR applications and all-day usage require a strong processor and a long battery life and memory, but the surface of the eye is limited and requires very tiny computing systems.

Another crucial question is what the interaction methods for smart contact lenses will be. Similar smartglasses that are designed for accessing notifications, such as Focals or a newly announced glasses product from Bosch Sensortec, are paired with finger-worn devices and touchpads in frames to enable interaction. In the case of Mojo Lens and other similar products, gaze-tracking is the interaction method that is leveraged and will allow users to control functions and perform tasks (such as clicking or navigating in virtual menus) with eye movement. The lack of interaction methods will require the user to spend significantly more time and effort to perform tasks.

Mojo Vision is not the first company that has tried to develop smart contact lenses, but most efforts have only reached the patent phase or less; Magic Leap, Google, Sony, and Samsung have secured similar patents.

ABI Research believes that undoubtedly smart contact lenses cannot compete with or replace high quality AR smartglass such as HoloLens 2, ThinkReality A6, Magic Leap 1, and others, and cannot be used in most use cases in which glasses are used today. Some use cases in the consumer space are more viable, being more competitive with other types of smartglasses, such as Focals, that provide similar applications in simple notification, navigation, etc. It is highly likely that Mojo Lens and other similar products may face the same challenges as consumer smartglasses as well, with the lack of valuable content and/or use cases being a common issue. Accessing notifications is not enough to capture attention and drive massive adoption, especially if the price is relatively high, and the experience from other more established wearables such as smartwatches has proven value here already.

Health monitoring is an interesting path for AR contacts, though, and potentially able to demonstrate value for some users. For instance, in 2014 Novartis, in collaboration with Google, announced its intention to design smart contact lenses for helping patients suffering from diabetes measure their glucose levels from their tears and communicate its analysis to their smartphones. While the project didn’t proceed due to lack of reliability, this potential has been recognized and explored in the past. Consequently, smart contact lenses may have a great advantage for healthcare monitoring applications, encouraging patients to get involved in monitoring chronic diseases digitally, independently, and at a lower cost. In addition, smart contact lenses may have a potential application in military to enhance vision capabilities especially during night and support soldiers with vital information.

Another issue that needs to be examined is the appearance of smart lenses in the human eye. A nonrealistic appearance will not be attractive to consumers, and manufacturers need to ensure that all computing systems are as discrete as possible. Price and product lifecycle will also play an important role in determining adoption rate and dominance compared to smart glasses and existing wearable devices. Traditional contact lenses have a limited life (one day to one year, depending on the type), and this is something that will not be acceptable if applied in smart contact lenses that include expensive computing components.

 All in all, augmented reality tends to push the envelope in terms of potential devices and how the market may progress over the coming years. Smart contact lenses have the potential to become an outstanding and ubiquitous product, but it is essential that they meet vital criteria for safety, comfort, ethicality, user and data protection, price, and value.  With that many variables to figure out, for now, AR contact lenses are a comfortably long-term vision.