mojo vision is probably one of the most well-funded promising augmented smart
contact lenses being produced right now but one thing that i'm not seeing in other youtube videos
is what the actual contact lens is and it's actually a contact lens that a lot of eye doctors
already prescribe and fit on their patients including me
so i wanted to make a video about this kind of go over the hardware of what's built into the
contact lens and what practical implications these contacts might have let's focus it
big recent news from mojo vision is now they actually have the contact lens with all of
their hardware built into it which actually makes it the first functioning smart augmented
reality contact lens now the next big steps are to improve on their software development but one of
the biggest remaining hurdles is to actually make it safe to wear on the eye they need fda approval
to make this contact lens a viable option so i'm just doing the finishing touches on this video and
i just ran across an article that mojo vision just started in eye testing now this was on their ceo
he was able to wear the contact for an hour so they're starting with baby steps
but that's kind of a big deal they're actually putting the contact lens in an eye that's huge
just a quick run through of the actual hardware the actual technology they were able to place
and fit into a contact lens they have the smallest and densest micro led display for dynamic content
at 14 000 pixels per inch they custom designed an accelerometer a gyroscope for ultra precise eye
tracking which is really key for ar because they need to know exactly where your eye is looking in
order to know where to put that augmented reality display they have a medical grade power system
with medical grade solid state batteries and they had to develop an eye controlled user experience
because you don't have a controller or a mouse for the cursor your eyes are the cursor so they
had to figure out a way for your eyes to know and tell what you want to look at on the display
crazy stuff by the way this is not one of the mojo smart contact lenses i just took a scleral
lens and a soft colored contact lens and put it in there so um yeah sorry i just i just wanted
something that maybe looked like it now what exactly is the contact lens they were able to
fit all of this technology in there these smart contact lenses are actually made from scleral
lenses and scleral contact lenses have actually been around for a while now i've been fitting them
on patients since i graduated from optometry school they are a hard contact lens a hard
rgp or rigid gas permeable contact lens they're not a soft contact lens a lot of people think that
there are other companies that are developing smart soft contact lenses i don't think the
technology in those is anywhere close to what mojo vision has in a scleral lens but yeah a
lot of people need to know that these are hard contact lenses and these are contact lenses are
big they're definitely bigger than soft contact lenses they're way bigger than normal hard
contact lenses and they can range from 15 to 21 millimeters in diameter which is actually
pretty big now one thing that's kind of tricky is a lot of people think that those would be
uncomfortable to wear but a lot of times these are more comfortable to wear than soft contacts
definitely more comfortable or can be more comfortable to wear than
small hard contact lenses so that's kind of surprising when you see something this big
and whenever i show patients this contact lens it kind of freaks them out a little bit because of
the size but really they can be quite comfortable and the reason why they're called scleral contact
lenses is the contact lens actually sits on the sclera of the eye or the white part of the eye
it does not even touch the cornea of the eye it completely vaults the cornea it only touches the
sclera of the eye and that's why they have to be so big now the main reasons why we fit
them on patients right now are for people that have corneal issues maybe they have keratoconus
marginal pellucid degeneration they have irregular corneas irregular shapes to their eye where normal
soft contacts normal hard contact lenses or glasses just don't do it for them don't give
them adequate enough vision one other thing that's kind of unique about these scleral contact lenses
is you actually have to fill it with a solution before you put the contact lens in and so your eye
or your cornea is fully bathed in in a solution the whole time that you're wearing a contact lens
and the reason why i want to bring that up is because you can also fit and prescribe these
contact lenses for people that have really bad dry eye issues so bad that they get dry patches and
ulcers on their cornea so you fit them with a scleral contact lens and their eye is constantly
bathed in a solution so then the eye or the surface the eye doesn't dry out now i've actually
done a few videos about sclera contact lenses how to put them in take them out how they're used to
treat dry eyes also that they're one of the best contact lenses for keratoconus so if you kind of
want to learn more about sclera contact lenses i'll put the link in the description for you now
when i think about the technology of just the scleral lenses by themselves it still blows my
mind i mean they have to be able to develop the hard contact lenses to make them comfortable to
make the edges sit on the sclera so it doesn't pinch too tight and cause irritation that's not
too flat it's where your eyelids are filling them and moving around too much they want to make sure
that it moves around just enough but not too much so that the tears can exchange in there
and the tears don't get stale you also want a good coating on the contact lenses so they don't fog
over and get really blurry so the technology alone in the scleral lenses blows my mind
and now the fact that they're taking technology that they've developed and fit into a scleral
lens for augmented reality and they're going to mesh it with a wearable scleral contact lens
is crazy to me good crazy it's a good crazy and that's why i say i think one of the remaining
hurdles of the contact lens is to make it safe to wear scleral contact lenses already
have the technology to make it safe but now they have this hardware and technology put
into the contact lenses is that contact gonna be breathable enough is it okay to
to wear batteries on the surface of your eyes so there's gonna be a lot of things that they're
going to have to look into just to make sure that it's safe and then they can get that fda approval
to wear these contact lenses so i think the main implications for these contact lenses
and they've actually stated this as well is at first they're going to target the low vision
population for people that might need a little bit more vision to highlight objects when they're
walking around and i actually have a few patients that have lower vision and wear scleral lenses so
i'm really interested in that aspect of augmented reality or smart contact lenses they've also
received funding to develop sports or fitness related applications which is super interesting
to me and then obviously the flashy really entertaining and exciting aspect of just general
augmented reality being able to walk around and view certain things and your vision is just kind
of mind-blowing i think that's down the road but i think we're gonna get there now i do plan on doing
more videos about smart contact lenses with other companies specifically soft smart contact lenses
i'm kind of curious what technology they're actually able to put into a soft contact lens
when that comes out i'll definitely put it in the link or right here to watch but you
can definitely check out one of my other videos i'm Dr. Neal Guymon, Dr. EyeGuy, stay focused.