Building Augmented Reality Into a Contact Lens - Mike Wiemer, Brian Lemoff, Mojo Vision

More Intelligent Tomorrow: a DataRobot Podcast

In this episode of More Intelligent Tomorrow, Global AI Evangelist, Ari Kaplan, sits down with Brian Lemoff, Fellow and Head of Optics at Mojo Vision, and Mike Wiemer, CTO at Mojo Vision, to discuss augmented reality, the future of wearable technology and the technology behind building a contact lens with built in display.

Brian and Mike work for Mojo Vison, a company hard at work developing the first smart contact lens. The technology behind Mojo Lens is staggering, with the lens containing roughly 14,000 pixels per inch, with pixels less than two microns apart, sensors that track where your eye is pointing, and a display less than half a millimeter wide.

But, how do you actually build something so functional in such a small space? Brian walks us through what it was like to start working at Mojo Vision;

“I think the first few months I was with the company, all we did was brainstorm. A day in the life of the early company was come in the morning, talk about how we are going to do this, come up with ideas, go off and test out theories. And, we'll do back of the envelope calculations, a little simulation, come back, here's what's not working. And over time, come up with an idea that you think, Hey, this could actually hold together. ” - Brian Lemoff

It turns out that the secret of building something revolutionary is to make changes incrementally over time.

When asked about the future of wearable augmented reality, Mike outlines his predictions, which include a belief that most people will have some form of augmented wearable in the future, but the experience must be “invisible” for it to be successful - which is why Mike calls this approach “invisible computing.”

“Our view is to create information systems that are invisible, and we call it invisible computing. It’s about trying to get all that hardware out of the way and let you maintain your ability to be a social creature and interact with other humans, and yet still have access to that kind of information. That's the vision of where we're trying to go.” - Mike Wiemer

Listen to this episode of More Intelligent Tomorrow to learn about:

• Augmented reality and how it can help people with disabilities
• The use cases for augmented reality in sport
• How to innovate in a constrained environment
• How to develop a user interface for an invisible computing experience