On the Horizon: Terminator-Style Contact Lens

Screens are so 20th century. An international team of engineers is working on the next leap in digital display technology—a contact lens that could project your email, text messages, and all sorts of other information straight onto your retina, Terminator-style, Discovery News reports. Right now they’re a long, long way from making that a reality, but they made a significant step recently, proving a primitive prototype was safe for rabbits, according to a new research paper.

The prototype consists of a lens embedded with a single LED and a circular antenna. Because the human eye can’t normally focus on anything that close to it, engineers also made a second contact covered with an array of incredibly thin Fresnel lenses to focus the light from the LED. Of course, the lens displays only one pixel, and because the lens is made of hard plastic that blocks airflow to the eye, it can be worn for only a few minutes. But researchers are confident they can work out those kinks. (More contact lenses stories.)