There’s a certain type of fascination when it comes to superheroes. We admire them for their special skills and we all dream (let’s face it, we all have our moments of craziness) of waking up one morning amazed by our tremendous and unlimited superpowers. We dream of being endowed with amazing physical strength, x-ray vision or the ability of reading other people’s thoughts. Imagination has no limits, but neither does the power of technology. Technology evolves rapidly, allowing us to interact and communicate better than before, it improves the quality of life and last but not least, it makes our dreams be more than just dreams. It helps us evolve and reach a new level of understanding.
Since superheroes are playing such an important role in our lives, scientists develop different concepts and apply theories, giving birth to complex devices. Not so long ago, we’ve presented the Iron Man-like helmet , developed by LiveMap. Now, we’ve bumped into another interesting project, this time developed by Eric Tremblay, lead researcher of EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Lausanne and his colleagues and the University of California. The project developed by the team of researchers consists of a pair of telescopic contact lenses, that can magnify images up to 2.8 times. Here is what the researchers have to say: “The magnified optical path incorporates a telescopic arrangement of positive and negative annular concentric reflectors to achieve 2.8x magnification on the eye, while light passing through a central clear aperture provides unmagnified vision. We present an experimental demonstration of the contact lens mounted on a life-sized optomechanical model eye and, using a pair of modified commercial 3D television glasses, demonstrate electrically operated polarization switching between normal and magnified vision.”
