It’s hardly ready for mass production, but New Scientist is reporting (via Evil Avatar) that scientists are working on embedding microscopic LED technology into contact lenses. Babak Parviz, who developed the idea, hopes to, “create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away.”

Despite the diode’s small size, it still requires power, and your eye is a terrible place to put a battery. Instead, the circuitry draws about 300 microamps from a loop antenna. This means that the lenses need a radio source for power, but modern Americans carry those everywhere they go anyway.

The system is still being used to project little pips of light onto the retinas of lab rabbits, but Parviz anticipates that micro-lenses will create the illusion of distance, cell phones will make viable power (and presumably data) source, and increased resolution will make the end user experience tolerable.

So how about it? What game would you want to play a fraction of an inch from your retina?

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