Rabbits Wear 1st Augmented Reality-Style Contact Lenses. Resolution: 1 Pixel

Bionic contact lenses---which would display navigation data, personal emails, or any other sort of info superimposed on the world before your eyes---have long been mainstays of science fiction. Over the past several years, researchers have been working to make the tech real-world ready, striving to find solutions to the energy, size, safety, and image-quality problems that come up when you're trying to fit a tiny integrated circuit into something transparent that sits on an eyeball. Now, University of Washington researchers and their Finnish colleagues have made the first functioning bionic lens: a prototype with a single LED pixel, which could be safely worn by rabbits in the lab. (The image at right shows a rabbit wearing an earlier version of the lens, which contained a circuit but no light-emitting components.) Radio frequency energy emitted from a nearby transmitter and picked up by a circular antenna a fifth of an inch ...