Inventor Explains Telescopic CLs

"We built a telescope into a contact lens. It is similar to a hard contact lens, but embedded inside are four tiny aluminum mirrors. These mirrors magnify the light, like a telescope, making images appear 2.8 times bigger," goes the post on Popular Science's website. "You can switch between magnified and normal vision by wearing modified 3-D television glasses. A button on the glasses changes their polarization. And polarized filters on the contact lenses determine whether the light passes through their magnifying part or their non-magnifying part. DARPA, a funder of our research, is interested in super vision. But the lenses may also work for people with macular degeneration, a disease that degrades the central part of the retina. Magnification makes it easier for those people to decipher small things, like text, with the healthy areas of their eyes." Read more.

In another report about the lens, BioOptics reports that "the lens' optics allow switching between normal and magnified vision with the addition of modified, off-the-shelf 3D television glasses: Without the glasses, the contact lenses superimpose both normal and magnified images. With the glasses on, a liquid-crystal shutter will switch open a window for normal or telescopic vision. The crystals change the way light is refracted onto polarized films embedded in the contact lens so that only light with a certain orientation, or polarization, passes through the glasses to the contact lens, hitting either the telescopic portion of the lens or the area designed for normal vision. The engineers are working on a hands-free infrared LED switch that will allow the wearer to activate one of the two functions by either winking one eye or blinking with both eyes." Read more.