I tried out Mojo Vision’s eye-tracking contact lenses.Ultimately, you can try it too.
In 2009, I started reviewing laptops at CNET.Now I explore wearable tech, VR/AR, tablets, gaming and future/emerging trends in our changing world.Other obsessions include magic, immersive theater, puzzles, board games, cooking, improv and the New York Jets.
A series of pop-up directional markers appeared, appearing as tiny green lines in my field of vision.When I turn around, I can see which direction north is.These are the marks on the compass, projected on a small MicroLED display, placed on a contact lens, and held in front of my eyes with a stick.After years of trying on smart glasses, my return to seeing things through the curved, nail-sized lenses is as wild as ever.Still, I’m not sure whether to wear it in my eyes.
Green Contact LensesX
Mojo Lens is a stand-alone display lens I tried earlier at CES 2020 in an early iteration before the pandemic, and the company says it will eventually be available for internal testing.
I tested Mojo Vision’s latest prototype lenses in an office building in midtown Manhattan a few weeks ago, as the company geared up for the next phase of in-house development.While Mojo’s contact lenses are still not approved for everyday use, these are another step forward and represent the company’s completed technology package to be included in version 1.0.
Mojo Vision’s technology is augmented reality in a sense.But not as you might think.The hard-lens monochrome green display can display text, basic graphics and even some illustrations, but it functions more like a smartwatch.The lens’ accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer also give it something I haven’t tried before: eye tracking.
The display of the lens is the green dot in the middle.That’s it.The hardware ring around the edge is motion tracking and other chip components.
Unlike eye-tracking technology in VR and AR glasses, which use a camera to sense eye movement, these lenses follow eye movement by actually sitting on your eye.Mojo Vision executives say that, like smartwatches, sensors can calculate movement more accurately than VR or AR glasses.I don’t actually wear these in my eyes because the lenses aren’t quite there yet.I held the lens very close to my eyes and turned my head to see the tracking effect.
When I tried Mojo’s footage in 2020, it was a version without onboard motion tracking tech or any batteries.The new version has a battery array, motion tracking and short-range wireless connectivity.
But the lens is not a standalone device.A custom wireless connection communicates directly with the additional neck-worn device, which Mojo calls a relay, which will act as a companion computer for the lens.I don’t see that part of the Mojo Vision hardware, only the lens.
These lenses can connect wirelessly with local devices, keeping motion tracking and display elements on the lens itself.
Lenses can’t connect directly to phones right now because lenses require a more energy-efficient short-range wireless connection.”Bluetooth LE is too chatty and power-hungry,” said Steve Sinclair, senior vice president of product at Mojo Vision, as he walked me through the latest demo.”We had to create our own.” The Mojo Vision’s wireless connection is in the 5GHz band, but Sinclair said the company still has work to do to make sure the wireless connection doesn’t pick up or cause interference.
“The phone doesn’t have the radio we need,” Sinclair said.”Because of the transmission capabilities of the lens, it needs to be slightly closer to the head.” He said the technology could be built into helmets or even glasses, but neckband-style devices are most practical right now.
Ideally, Mojo aims to enable longer-distance connections in the future.However, the neck-mounted processor will be able to connect to the phone.It pulls the GPS off the phone and connects using the phone’s modem, making the neckband a bridge.
How I look through the lens, turn my head.Not exactly the same as wearing one, but I’m as close as I can get now.
Lifting my head and looking around the room with lenses on a stick in front of me is not the same as wearing contact lenses with eye tracking.Even after this demo, the actual experience of wearing Mojo Vision lenses in the wild is still unknown.But even compared to my last Mojo demo in January 2020, seeing how the interface works on-camera makes the experience feel more real.
In many ways, it’s reminiscent of a pair of smart glasses called Focals made by North, which Google acquired in 2020.North Focals projects a small LED display inside the eye that works like a tiny readout, but without eye tracking.I can see glimpses around the lens that can bring some information, very much like a smartwatch on my head, or like Google Glass…except different, too.The bright display hung in the air like etched light, then disappeared.
I saw a ring interface, a simulation of what I saw on my eye-tracking Vive Pro VR headset when I last visited Mojo Vision in Las Vegas in 2020.I can see a small crosshair falling on the little app icon around the ring, and staying on an icon for a few seconds will open it.The ring around the periphery of my field of view remained invisible until I looked to the edge, where app-like widgets appeared.
I saw a travel app that simulates finding flight information for an airplane, and a little graphic showing where my seat is.I can glance at other windows (my Uber ride info, my gate).Another app-like widget shows what it looks like to see pop-up fitness data on the display (heart rate, lap information, like smartwatch readings).Another widget displays an image: I see a little baby Yoda (aka Grogu), rendered in shades of green.Also, Han Solo’s classic Star Wars footage.These images show that the display looks good enough to view pictures and read text.The other is a teleprompter that plays text that I can read aloud.When I looked away from the app and went back to the outer ring, the prompt disappeared again.
It wasn’t easy to figure out how to move it right, but I didn’t even try these shots the way I expected.It seems to me that they move as my eyes move, directly controlling the interface.Outside of my eyes, I have to tilt my head up and down.Mojo Vision promises that the experience on the eyes will make the display feel more real and fill my field of vision.This makes sense since I moved the monitor a bit away from my eyes.The lens’s display sits just above my pupil, with its narrow display window aligned with the area where the fovea, the most detailed part of the center of our vision, is located.Looking back out of the loop means closing one app, or opening another.
The Mojo Vision lens I’m looking at now definitely has more onboard hardware than the 2020 version I’ve seen before, but it’s not fully activated yet.”It has a radio, it has a display, it has three motion sensors, it has a lot of battery and power management systems built into it. It has all these things in it,” Sinclair told me.But the power system on the lens has not been activated to work inside the eye.Instead, now, the lens is attached to a forearm mount that I hold while powering it.Currently, the demo I’m trying is using a wireless chip to pull data in and out of the lens to make it display.
The Mojo Lens’ lens itself has a small Arm Cortex M0 processor that handles encrypted data running in and out of the lens, as well as power management.The neckband computer will run the app, interpret the eye-tracking data, and update the image position in a 10-millisecond loop.While graphics data isn’t dense in some ways (it’s a “300-pixel-diameter piece of content,” Sinclair says), the processor needs to constantly update this data quickly and reliably.If things get out of sync, it can quickly disorient eye fans.
Drew Perkins, CEO of Mojo Vision, will be the first to wear the lenses.Then the rest of the company’s executives will come sometime after that, along with the rest of their executive team, Sinclair said.The fitness and exercise partnership the company announced earlier this year aims to conduct some early tests to see how the lenses work with fitness and athletic training apps.
Mojo Vision is also working on getting these lenses to work as medically-approved assistive vision devices, but these steps may still need to be advanced.”We can imagine low-vision users having a second high-resolution camera built into a pair of glasses, or hooked to their ears – they look at something and it takes a very high-resolution picture, Then it’s in their eyes and they can pan and zoom and see things,” Sinclair said of the future.Mojo Vision isn’t there yet, but testing these eye-tracking wearable microdisplays will be a start.
Additionally, these lenses will require FDA approval as contact lenses, an ongoing process at Mojo Vision.They also need to be manufactured with various prescriptions, and the company aims to protect the chip hardware with an artificial iris and make the lenses look more normal.
“We have work to do to make it a product. It’s not a product,” Sinclair emphasized the placement of the Mojo Vision lens.As the first person to attempt an intraocular test of these lenses, I would be very nervous, but why not?This technology has never existed before.As far as I know, only another company, InWith, is working on smart contact lenses.I’ve never seen any demos of how these competing soft lenses work, and those don’t seem to have displays yet.The cutting edge of tiny wearable displays makes previous cutting-edge smart glasses obsolete by comparison.
Post time: Apr-22-2022
