Meant to be Seen

Apparently Magic Leap is already envisioning their technology in contact lenses as one their 97 patents filed last week deals with that subject.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/20 ... n-one-week

In principle virtual contact lenses should be already possible to build.
OLEDs can be as thin as 10micron, flexible and strechable.
On a contact lens you'd only need the foveas resolution(2millionRGB pixel) since the screen on a lens would move along with the visual axis.
Innovega inc. has invented optics that make it possible to focus on a object that sits right on your eye.
They plan to sell virtual glasses with a FOV of 70°(1 inch OLED) in combination with contact lenses.
No bulky optics needed anylonger.

Quantum dot nanocrystals would probably be better since they are smaller and lower power.

Then there is the issue of a microlens array for focus, or a similar method for an integral lightfield display.

The issue I have with every proposed contact lens is that to efficiently power and supply data, the transmitter will probably need to be very near the contact lens search coils. This may involve the transmitters being embedded in a pair of glasses anyway.

Also it would be very difficult to do subtractive augmented reality when the device is essentially co-planar with the pupil. The ray model of light can't be used, instead the ambient scene would have to be imaged onto the display plane and then relayed with the inverse of the imager to reconstruct the natural focus at the plane of interest.
The lens to image the ambient scene for occlusion would have to be better than f/1, so would probably be replaced with a micro optical array (either pinholes or lenses). This introduces problems of increased processing, limited ambient resolution and diffraction.
Therefore we may see video pass-through contact lenses which block out any direct transmission of ambient light and instead relay a video signal from embedded camera pixels or perhaps a more innovative camera-display hybrid again using the quantum dot nanocrystals.

Kind regards,
Jack