Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in the Western world. But help is on the way in the form of telescoping contact lenses that act like tiny, low-magnification binoculars. A team including researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the University of California San Diego, and several other institutions have been working on the project for several years with financial backing from DARPA.

The lenses can work on their own, but they are made better with a pair of complementary glasses which respond to winks to switch between regular and magnified vision. The glasses ignore blinking, but wink with your right eye and the magnification function switches on. Wink with your left eye and the lenses switch back to normal vision.

The contacts are made from carefully shaped layers of plastics, aluminum mirrors, and polarizing thin films, all held together with biologically safe glues. Unlike the soft lenses many people wear, the telescoping contact lenses are larger and more rigid to accommodate the telescoping mechanism. One of the most challenging aspects of developing this technology has been making the lenses breathable so they can be worn for extended periods.

There are plenty of areas in which improvements need to be made before the lenses can be used in any practical capacity. But the current iteration is a promising start toward technology that can benefit the visually impaired and even help soldiers stay sharp and aware on the frontlines.

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Being fitted for contact lenses isn’t really a difficult or painful process. A few minutes in the optician’s chair and you’re out of the door with a prescription in hand. It definitely was not that easy in the early days of contacts, though. In the 1940s, those suckers were thick, made of glass, and came with an insanely uncomfortable-looking fitting process.

To get the shape of the lens just right, the optician had to smush some impression-forming slime right onto your eyeball on the end of a suction cup-type device. It was like having a dental impression taken, but on your eyeball. The actress in this newsreel video had to have been paid an awful lot not to scream in horror as that stuff was hardening on her eye.

After the impressions were made, skilled technicians went to work forming, sanding, and filing little discs of glass for wearers to shove into their eye sockets. The newsreel even refers to the lenses as “glasses,” and the model looks exceedingly uncomfortable wearing them. But, hey, guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, right? At least the external glasses that you don’t have to pry out of your eyes every six hours.

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The eye is an extremely complex organ – no matter what species of animal. The human eye is sensitive enough to recognize more than 500 shades of grey. Our depth of field is excellent, but we lack the wide-angle range of the eyes of a fly. A hybrid human/fly eye was inevitable.

Associate Professor of biomedical engineering and ophthalmology at Ohio State University, Yi Zhao has come up with an experimental lens that would combine the depth of field capabilities of the human eye with the wide-angle capabilities of an insect eye. “Our eye can change focus. An insect eye is made of many small optical components that can’t change focus but give a wide view. We can combine the two,” says Zhao. “What we get is a wide-angle lens with depth of field.”

The lens can be applied to many different fields of technology, from laparoscopy and microscopes to smartphone cameras. Its ability to correct focus by altering its shape could also give surgeons more confidence. With delicate procedures such as tumor removal, it will allow them a wide-angle view while easily gauging the proximity of lens to tissue. It’s another great example of how biomimicry can change our view of the world – quite literally.

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For someone with age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, wearing contact lenses is a luxury not currently available, as they simply can’t meet the requirements for plain sight. A team of American and Swiss engineers is working on a way to alleviate this problem.

Typical contact lenses only re-focus the wearer’s vision. Newly invented lenses for those with AMD will have the ability to re-focus and magnify. They come as a result of the team’s research into improving the eyesight of those with retina damage.

They found that when vision becomes magnified, more light is allowed to enter someone with AMD’s eyesight, thus the parts of the retina that remain intact are allowed light that wouldn’t usually be available. When a pair of liquid crystal glasses is worn, parts of the contact lenses can be shut off to fit in with the wearer’s environment.

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The eyes are already said to be the windows to the soul; now researchers are working to make them the windows to the body’s health as well. Jin Zhang, a professor of chemical and biochemical engineering at the University of Western Ontario, has developed contact lenses that could alert diabetics to their changing blood glucose levels. They change colors when the wearer’s glucose level shifts, allowing diabetics to monitor their health without the pain and inconvenience of drawing blood samples several times a day.

The lenses are made of special nanoparticles embedded in formed hydrogel. The nanoparticles are specially engineered to react chemically to glucose molecules in the wearer’s tears. When the glucose level experiences a significant change, the contact lenses change colors, alerting the wearer to the need to take action. Of course, for the lenses to be effective you would either have to have a mirror at hand at all times or be with someone who knows to check your eye color periodically. The Canada Foundation for Innovation liked Zhang’s idea so much that they awarded him more than $200,000 (Canadian) to continue his work on this and similar projects.

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