Wearing contact lenses can be a real pain the first few times but what Samsung has done is going to get more people used to that pain in no time. According to the Samsung-centric blog SamMobile, the tech giant Samsung has just patented ‘smart contact lenses’ with an inbuilt camera in South Korea. The contact lenses will be able to project images straight into a user’s eye using a display.
The smart lenses have are called so for a reason, they have an inbuilt camera and sensitive sensors which can be controlled by just blinking. The content seen is then sent to your smartphone through embedded antennas and stored in the phone.
According to the report by SamMobile, Samsung is going ahead with this plan of action because they want to develop an alternative to improved augmented reality experiences offered by other current wearables. This is where the smart lens comes into play; the lenses will give users a more discreet augmented reality experience than ever before. Something which is not possibly achieved with glasses (subtle point).
Using an ocular interface like this has got a lot of pros but then there are setbacks too for example it can lead you to awkward situations such as getting input which you don’t want and other related stuff. But then again it’s not really unrealistic if you think about it, the company has put an option of controlling the interface using your smartphone to avoid such problems.
With the newly owned patent in South Korea, Samsung has finally entered the league of patents for smart lenses where Google stands high already with two patents along the same lines. However Google’s contact lenses are more oriented towards medical use containing highly flexible electronics and sensor motions to read tear a fluid chemical which allows the tech to find out the users blood sugar level.
Patent diagrams for the smart contact lens. Credit Korea Intellectual Property Right Service (KIPRIS)
This is still not a developed idea for commercial use but more likely a concept for now because Samsung filed for a patent for the smart contact lens in 2014. So we shouldn’t be expecting actively produced smart contact lenses anytime soon it seems, this is because tech companies are always looking for innovation and they file multiple patents before their competitors but this never means that the product will be commercially produced. All a patent means is the right to produce the tech and as many technologies are being patented and developed simultaneously you never know when this might be commercial. So fingers crossed on this one, do let us know what you think about this tech in the comments below.
