DARPA is reportedly eyeing a high-tech contact lens straight out of 'Mission: Impossible'
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is reportedly interested in a new wirelessly-connected contact lens recently unveiled in France, the latest in the agency's ongoing search for small-scale technology to augment U.S. service members' visual capabilities in the field.
Researchers at leading French engineering IMT Atlantique in mid-April announced "the first autonomous contact lens incorporating a flexible micro-battery," a lightweight lens capable of not only providing augmented vision assistance to users but relaying visual information wirelessly — not unlike, say, the lens Jeremy Renner uses in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol to scan a batch of nuclear codes:
More importantly, the new lens can perform its functions without a bulky external power supply, capable of "continuously supply[ing] a light source such as a light-emitting diode (LED) for several hours, according to the IMT Atlantique announcement.
"Storing energy on small scales is a real challenge," said Thierry Djenizian, head of the Flexible Electronics Department at the Centre Microélectronique de Provence Georges Charpak and co-head of the project.
The lens was primarily designed for medical and automotive applications, but according to French business magazine L'Usine Nouvelle ('The New Factory'), the lens has garnered interest from both DARPA and Microsoft, which was recently contracted by the the U.S. Army to furnish soldiers with with its HoloLens augmented reality headset.
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