Who Needs Fingers?

You’re involved in a high-stakes poker game of epic proportions. Your entire life savings sits in front of you on the table (approximately $55). You’ve got what could be a sweet hand…except you can’t remember a flush from a straight. But checking your smartphone would be construed as a tell at best, or more likely, outright cheating.

So what are you to do?

Why, you simply look up the information on your contact lens, of course.

Or maybe you’re out for the first time with a hot date and the bartender ridicules your girly drink choice choice (What? Who doesn’t enjoy an Appletini?). But, not unlike George Costanza, you can’t seem to think of a witty comeback to put this jackanapes in his place.

Just scroll through a list of witty comebacks on your lens, just like the Governator in the first Terminator movie.
Frankly, one would think Skynet would have come up with better options, but robots aren’t usually known for their sense of humor.

Anyway, sooner or later, our smartphones will no longer require touchscreens. All that information (and internet porn) all displayed directly into your pupils, completely hands free, which allows hands to do other things…like slice vegetables while reading an online recipe.

Life would be irrevocably changed; what need would we have for books? Your Kindle would be on your eyeball. Exams? Bah, the cheatsheet’s right here smashed against my iris, no problem. Targetting reticules for archery aficionados, stock information for brokers, blueprints for construction teams. Laptops would be a thing of the past; with the screen on your peepers, all you’d need to haul around would be a small keyboard.

“OK, great,” you say. “But they don’t have those yet, right?”

Wrong.

University of Washington scientists and their colleagues in Finland have created a bionic contact lens that actually works on rabbits (at Bugs Bunny’s age, you’d think he’d go for LASIK, but he’s old-school). A circular antenna a fifth of an inch in diameter is implanted in the lens and picks up radio wave emissions that power the display. And what did they display in the twinkling eye of dear old Bugs?

One…pixel.

So it’s a work in progress. But it’s a start. Soon they’ll have two pixels, and before you know it you’ll be able to play Pong on your very own eyeball!

I should probably take a moment to mention the current drawbacks:

In a petri dish, the range from the radio wave battery to the lens was three feet. So you could wear a D-battery or something on your belt and get away with it. Unfortunately, once placed in the eye, the gunk and gooies and eye-goobers mess with reception, so the range gets shortened a bit. As in, the range shrinks to less than an inch.

So start thinking of ways to roll with the battery-stapled-to-your-temple look.