Support NeoGAF

[crimsonheadGCN]

“The technician made me sit in a chair that reminded me uncomfortably of a dentist’s chair, and asked me if I had ever worn contact lenses; I hadn’t. “It’s OK,” she said, “it’ll just take a minute or two for your eyes to adjust.” Indeed, after a few eye drops, my eyes adjusted to the transparent lenses and I almost forgot they were there.”

Once Varoufakis had the lenses in he says that he was handed a small box with a silver dial. Turning this dial increased the visibility of the image that was to be projected onto the lenses.

“The technician motioned and I started turning the dial. Suddenly, I saw him! He was eight feet tall, and stood out behind the technician. The first thing I noticed was his expressive red eyes and the scales he was covered in. Faint steam emanated from his nostrils. With slow, steady steps, he moved to the right, revealing all of himself from behind the technician, who was obviously having fun with my expression. As prepared as I was, the sight of the alien took my breath away. Even though I knew it was just a projection from the contact lenses onto my optical nerve, logic was having trouble defeating my instincts, which screamed at me to run toward the nearest exit.”

More at the link plus original source: http://www.pcgamesn.com/strange-case-valve-economist-and-virtual-reality-contact-lenses

This sounds very exciting, but I wonder if it's real or if it's just him talking about what could happen in the not so distant future.

And I wonder if Valve has any part in the development of this technology?

 

[Terra]

I think The Rift is more realistic.

 

[Kurdel]

Amazing. The next ten years will be incredible.

 

[FlyinJ]

More at the link plus original source: http://www.pcgamesn.com/strange-case-valve-economist-and-virtual-reality-contact-lenses

This sounds very exciting, but I wonder if it's real or if it's just him talking about what could happen in the not so distant future.

And I wonder if Valve has any part in the development of this technology?

That sounds like a total load of BS. Especially the "small box with a silver dial". What is this, virtual reality in the 70s?

 

[Heavy's Sandvich]

VALVe's answer to google glasses.

 

[Astral/H3X]

This sounds very smart and will not be used to scare the bejeesus out of 10 year olds anywhere.

 

[Jacobi]

I really don't like stuff like this or google glasses. These could be abused for horrible things if they were mass products.

 

[injurai]

 

[Karkador]

They hired an economist to write sci-fi short stories.

 

[Alx]

This sounds very exciting, but I wonder if it's real or if it's just him talking about what could happen in the not so distant future.

Obviously a futuristic speculation... If anything, I doubt we have the technology to embed power sources in contact lenses to allow for image generation.

 

[KingofGourds]

Replace the terrifying alien with *insert hot celebrity here* and we're in business baby.

 

[Draft]

My brand!

 

[Kinyou]

So basically this:

http://vimeo.com/46304267

 

[LemonGremlin]

He's talked about this cryptically before (seeing a virtual alien, following it around the room). He didn't mention contact lenses last time though, or the 'dial'.

 

[enzo_gt]

So I gotta bring my contacts case to take my contacts out every time I want to game?

Interesting technology, but I have the same problem as I have with the Rift. It's just more shit you gotta put on or do before you game, not to mention it alienates a good chunk of people who already have vision problems unless there's some lengthy calibration process that also accommodates those people too. It's just shortsighted (no pun intended), and surprisingly Nintendo has been the only person to tackle this issue effectively.

 

[Shai-Tan]

I listened when he was a guest on the Econtalk podcast and he seemed out of his depth regarding games, the games industry, and technology so I wouldn't read to much into what he says about those things.

 

[Dance Inferno]

So technically one could watch movies and play games at work while no one knows?

 

[LemonGremlin]

From an older article (Nov 2012):

At the time period between March till June I went back to Valve and we begun a research program of systematic study of their economies. Within a few days we had the first results that shed light on the way prices are determined and how arbitrage is fluctuating. At the same time, I got the chance to “see the future”. You see, in addition to their game software, Valve has started developing hardware. Worried by Microsoft’s and Apple’s tendency to claim a bigger and bigger cut of its profits (in order to allow users access to Valve games through the computers that run their software), Valve has started experimenting with its own machines that give you the ability to run these games without a (Microsoft or Apple-controlled) computer. I’ve signed an NDA so I can’t reveal much more. I’ll just say that I really saw the future. (it’s not a small deal to see a virtual but highly realistic alien stand beside a real human in the same room with you, walk around the room and wink at you. And all that without a screen, a projector or even a computer near you…)

 

[crimsonheadGCN]

From an older article (Nov 2012):

Google translation of the original source for the article that I posted:

I saw him, after I had signed my contract that forbade tell you where I saw him and to reveal technical details concerning exactly how it appeared in front of me (which, but anyway, I could not give you, as I'm ignorant on this). Suffice it to say that in order to come to see him, I had to descend into semi basement of the building which housed the laboratory in which evolved required for the "appearance" of technologies, after I had thoroughly checked for any device that could record the "meeting." Πηγή: www.lifo.gr

It looks like he talking about the same event here. So Valve does have a part in this.

 

[angular graphics]

More at the link plus original source: http://www.pcgamesn.com/strange-case-valve-economist-and-virtual-reality-contact-lenses

This sounds very exciting, but I wonder if it's real or if it's just him talking about what could happen in the not so distant future.

And I wonder if Valve has any part in the development of this technology?

It's real, but I'm not sure it's Valve's tech. Obviously it's Valve that took him to that place to experience this, but it might be (and I suspect it is) some other third party company.

 

[alexandros]

It's real, but I'm not sure it's Valve's tech.

It sounds like Abrash's work.

 

[PSiCHO]

They hired an economist to write sci-fi short stories.

Unfortunately Gabe has no control over him.

 

[SquiddyCracker]

They hired an economist to write sci-fi short stories.

Yep.
Really corny ones.

 

[Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew]

Next-gen:

 

[JWong]

I'm not going to be wearing any contact lenses...

 

[Jarmel]

Yea I'm calling bullshit until I see something.

 

[angular graphics]

It sounds like Abrash's work.

It also sounds like it's not housed in the Valve HQ though, which makes me believe it's Valve visiting companies that work on things like that to be inspired/sign a contract/etc.

 

[Weltall Zero]

So we now have the technology to embed a wireless receiver, a processing unit and a ultra high-density display in a transparent contact lens.

Yeah, no.

 

[Buttonbasher]

That sounds like a waking nightmare.

Also I have serious concerns about vision loss with a lot of these devices. I've noticed staring at smart phones as closely as I do at night has led to noticable loss in my eye quality. I imagine these devices will have similar effect.

 

[Not Spaceghost]

Yea I'm calling bullshit until I see something.

Given the context of everything this post made me laugh really hard.

 

[Tom_Cody]

I listened when he was a guest on the Econtalk podcast and he seemed out of his depth regarding games, the games industry, and technology so I wouldn't read to much into what he says about those things.

Right.

Gabe Newell mentioned that Valve has been monitoring research for direct optic nerve displays (or something like that) when he was on the Nerdist podcast but this story is pure BS.

Some version of this will exist eventually but it does not exist now. Neither the display technology nor the AR technology that could produce this result are close to being fully formed.

 

[nickcv]

these are just the perfect device to send someone unaware of wearing them into an hysteric state.

killing people will never be more easy.
also i'd like to see what would be the long term consequences for wearing those lenses.

really do not want.

 

[Meia]

It would make sense.

I know, I know, seems far fetched, and doubt it'll come out this year or anything, but remember how 15 years ago the internet wasn't even a thing really? Yeah, technology can change very fast, and usually in bounds. Hell, the idea of the iphone is only 6 years old!


The only real problem is like someone else said: Energy. We've advanced fast when it comes to technology, but when it comes to how to power it, we're still like we were decades ago really. It's improving, but not nearly as fast as other facets have become.




I can see where they're going with this, and it probably isn't just a games thing. Most of us have iphones and stuff that give us info at the push of a fingertip, is it really that hard to swallow in a decade or so we won't have to look down, but we'll all have something like contacts put in almost give us a HUD as we walk around?


And doesn't exist now? No, it probably does, just not widespread now. People date the internet back to the 1960s....

 

[Tom_Cody]

It would make sense.

I know, I know, seems far fetched, and doubt it'll come out this year or anything, but remember how 15 years ago the internet wasn't even a thing really? Yeah, technology can change very fast, and usually in bounds. Hell, the idea of the iphone is only 6 years old!

The only real problem is like someone else said: Energy. We've advanced fast when it comes to technology, but when it comes to how to power it, we're still like we were decades ago really. It's improving, but not nearly as fast as other facets have become.

I can see where they're going with this, and it probably isn't just a games thing. Most of us have iphones and stuff that give us info at the push of a fingertip, is it really that hard to swallow in a decade or so we won't have to look down, but we'll all have something like contacts put in almost give us a HUD as we walk around?


And doesn't exist now? No, it probably does, just not widespread now. People date the internet back to the 1960s....

I think most people agree with the part I bolded. The point is that what the Valve economist is saying is made up.

 

[Zuhzuhzombie!!]

No fucking thank you.

 

[Clockwork5]

Don't contacts drift a little bit when you blink and such? and wouldn't that cause some major image ghosting in this tech? Not that I think its real or anything.

/fingerscrossed

 

[epmode]

Man, real life is going to get a lot more cyberpunk. I love this stuff.

 

[Razgreez]

I'm sure i saw a sony patent for similar technology

 

[angular graphics]

LED mounted in a contact lens for possible virtual / augmented reality displays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHECpEhJdB8

Every so often, internet news aggregator sites run a story about a research group that put an LED into a contact lens, then inserted it into a rabbit's eye. I figured that I would try the same thing, but put the lens into my own eye. I accomplished this by laminating a coil of wire and an 0402 surface-mount LED between two ordinary soft contact lenses. I was hoping the lenses would stick to each other, but they did not, so I ended up fixing the edges together by pinching the plastic together with hot tweezers. This held well enough to capture a minute of video with the LED illuminated in my eye. For video purposes, I mounted the LED facing outward. An actual VR/AR display would have the LED facing inward.

I powered the LED by using a very primitive spark-gap transmitter built from a mechanical relay to send RF energy into a larger coil held near my eye. The large coil coupled the energy into the contact lens coil and pulsed the LED.

Ben Krasnow... works at Valve: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-krasnow/4/6a9/679

Mechanical and Electrical Engineer
Valve corporation

October 2011 – Present (1 year 6 months) Bellevue, WA

I helped create Valve's hardware division in late 2011. Valve was a software-only gaming company and sought expertise to launch a new venture in hardware. My responsibilities have included hiring, purchasing, choosing projects, budgeting, as well as hands-on work such machine tool operation, CNC programming, 3D modeling, circuit design, sensor integration and prototype design. My primary day-to-day work involves quickly building prototypes of consumer electronic devices using my skills as an electrical and mechanical engineer. I am very hands-on and prefer to iterate quickly on a design by building and testing in a short cycle.

 

[angular graphics]

^ Bump

 

[Corto]

They hired an economist to write sci-fi short stories.

You stole my thoughts! hehe

 

[commissar]

Sounds as though, if really the case, the chair would have transmitters etc built in.


Personally I reckon it's a combination of projection, an opaque gas and the lens filtering particular wavelengths....and showmanship.

Or fiction

also to whoever asked, contct lenses are typically weighted slightly to assist in orientation if the wearer has an astigmatism

 

[The Elite]

I'm not going to be wearing any contact lenses...

No fucking thank you.

You guys didn't ask for this?

Not sure I would put contacts in myself.

 

[angular graphics]

LED mounted in a contact lens for possible virtual / augmented reality displays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHECpEhJdB8



Ben Krasnow... works at Valve: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-krasnow/4/6a9/679

From the Steam forums:

http://www.designboom.com/technology/bionic-virtual-reality-contact-lenses/

innovega is working with the US DARPA ('defense advanced research projects agency')
to create a prototype and beta testing for the military, expecting a consumer model available
within the next several years for about the same price as normal contact lenses.

http://innovega-inc.com/benefits.php

Innovega will change how we look at our world – “both” our real-world and our digital world that today provides us with so much of our entertainment and valuable information. By enhancing our normal vision using special contact lenses we make it possible to view virtual and augmented reality images in the same way we view our real world. It further enables us to select how we personalize, coordinate and blend our virtual media with real-world activities. iOptik ™ will be the platform of choice for emerging social media and augmented reality applications.

The conventional approach to designing video eyewear locates tiny flat-panel displays in the frame and aligns them with optical components that focus the image so that the wearer perceives they are viewing a normal television screen or small monitor. While this approach has merit, it results in a trade-off of viewable screen size with the bulk of necessary eyewear optics. Innovega recognized that in order for video eyewear to advance as a successful new category of product, this trade-off needed to be removed. In our designs, the optics are entirely eliminated from the eyewear frame enabling higher performance and better style than ever before.

The following video was recorded at CES 2012.

iOptik Lens: Contact Lenses with Augmented Reality by Innovega demonstrated at CES 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x70ZKwlC1Es

As weird as it sounded at first.. there are indeed companies out there that think (and work on prototypes) contact lenses will make virtual reality.. a reality.

http://www.valvetime.net/threads/is-this-valves-secret-vortex-project.243251/

 

[Atomski]

Cool concept.. but its a long ways off.

 

[Alx]

LED mounted in a contact lens for possible virtual / augmented reality displays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHECpEhJdB8



Ben Krasnow... works at Valve: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-krasnow/4/6a9/679

Induction powered ? I wouldn't want to make it a habit to keep my head in a Tesla coil... And if you need to wear a powering system, you could just as well wear a display like glasses.
Cool idea nonetheless...

 

[Night_Trekker]

Paging David Icke... turns out They Live was more prescient than anyone could have imagined!

Spoiler

This is cool tech.

 

[ElectricKaibutsu]

Has anyone read Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge? If wearable computers with contact lens displays aren't common in 30 years, I'd be very surprised.

 

[EVIL]

Obviously a futuristic speculation... If anything, I doubt we have the technology to embed power sources in contact lenses to allow for image generation.

induction, also called "wireless power"

also a augmented reality contact lens doesnt need allot of power to operate.

Seeing the light—LED light—is a reasonable accomplishment. But seeing something useful through the lens is clearly the ultimate goal. Fortunately, the human eye is an extremely sensitive photodetector. At high noon on a cloudless day, lots of light streams through your pupil, and the world appears bright indeed. But the eye doesn’t need all that optical power—it can perceive images with only a few microwatts of optical power passing through its lens. An LCD computer screen is similarly wasteful. It sends out a lot of photons, but only a small fraction of them enter your eye and hit the retina to form an image. But when the display is directly over your cornea, every photon generated by the display helps form the image.

 

[Zaptruder]

It seems improbable to me that we would have such high resolution tiny packages available to us at this point in time. We may have the inklings of such a technology...

But the closest that I'm aware of towards having contact lens based VR tech is the Innovega stuff; which is pretty cool in its own right.

Basically, an even wider FOV than the Rift... but lighter, and with the potential to use OLED/LCD transparency blanking techniques. The primary limitation is that you need to wear glasses (display) AND contacts (allows display to work) for the system to work.


But still, I imagine that working so close to such amazing technology (even if it's primarily in a spectator capacity) would excite a layperson like Fourakis no end. As an economist; I can imagine that he can see the big picture, future potential of this kind of technology and is extrapolating a case of what it'll be like in a few years; when the technology is somewhat more ubiquitous.