A step beyond conventional corrective eyewear, the Ocumetics Bionic Lens, invented by Dr. Garth Webb of Ocumetics Technology Corp, is a painless implant that can give patients the ability to see beyond the normal scope of 20/20 (perfect) vision.

The results were presented at a cataract and refractive surgery conference after years of research, experimentation and iteration, funded to the tune of $3,000,000 for research, patents, tests and trials. The procedure for implanting these, however, is much faster: just eight minutes in a chair.

The lens is not just an overlay but a surgical implant, attaching to the actual lens of the eye. Vision is completely corrected as soon as the installation is complete. Further, the implant helps protect eyes against future cataracts by defending it against decay and is touted to be safer than laser eye surgery. Its creators hope the lenses will be out and on the market by 2017.

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Using a substance found in deep-sea fish and sometimes used to treat night blindness in humans, a search group has been able to develop a way for people to see up to 150 feet in the dark.

In “people becoming superhuman” news, a small independent research group has figured out how to give humans night vision, allowing them identify faces at over 50 meters in the dark for a short time. Developed by Science for the Masses near Los Angeles, California, the technique involves dropping 50 microliters of Ce6 into the conjunctival sac of the patient’s eye, which then carries the chemical on to the retina.

Subsequent testing showed an uncanny ability to spot even small objects dozens of feet away, and to fully distinguish human faces at much greater distances in natural darkness with 100% accuracy, something only a third of untreated test subjects could do. Their work has yielded the paper A Review on Night Enhancement Eyedrops Using Chlorin e6.

The mission here goes beyond giving everyday people access to transhuman abilities – it is also about opening up scientific curiosity and experimentation for the mass population, obviating the need for lab equipment and encouraging others to create or repeat experiments on their own (at everyone’s own risk, of course – do not try this at home!).

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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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Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have come up with a prototype device that will read lines of text as the user runs a finger over the page. The FingerReader is a small device that fits over the knuckle of the index finger. It contains a camera which “reads” the text on the page and then says it aloud for the reader.

For vision-impaired readers, this device could be an amazing step forward in how they read. Books that aren’t available in audio format would suddenly become accessible. The FingerReader doesn’t just read the words on the page; it indicates (via haptic cues) when the user has reached the end of a line, then when they reach the beginning of the next line. The device also indicates when the reader’s finger is drifting from the line of text and provides cues to move the finger higher or lower on the page.

It’s obvious from the video above that the device is, in fact, a “research prototype.” It doesn’t work perfectly, and the voice conversion can definitely use some work. But the concept is so great that it’s bound to undergo further development until the kinks are ironed out.

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