Mojo Vision said it has created a new prototype of its Mojo Lens augmented reality contact lenses. This smart contact lens will bring “invisible computing” to life, the company believes.

The Mojo Lens prototype is a critical milestone for the company in its development, testing, and validation process, and is an innovation positioned at the intersection of smartphones, augmented reality/virtual reality, smart wearables, and information technology. Health.

The prototype includes numerous new hardware features and technologies built directly into the lens, enhancing its display, communications, eye-tracking and power system.

Over the past two years, Saratoga, California-based Mojo Vision has also been investing in various software experiences for Mojo Lens. In this new prototype, the company has created fundamental components of the operating system code and user experience (UX) for the first time. The new software will enable further development and testing of important use cases for consumers and partners.

The initial target market is for people with low vision, as it will be a medically approved device that can help partially blind people see things better, such as road signs.

“We don’t refer to this as a product,” said Steve Sinclair, senior vice president of products and marketing, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We refer to it as a prototype. Next year for us will be taking what we learned from this because now we understand how to build a smart contact lens with all the elements. Now it’s optimization. It is software development. It is the development of experience. It is a security test. It’s really understanding how it works as a low vision product for that first customer that interests us.”

This new Mojo Lens prototype will further accelerate the development of invisible computing (a term coined by technologist Don Norman long ago), a next-generation computing experience where information is available and presented only when needed. This visual experience allows users to access timely information quickly and discreetly without forcing them to look down at a screen or lose focus on the people and world around them.

Mojo has identified early consumer uses of invisible computing for high-performance athletes, and recently announced strategic partnerships with leading sports and fitness brands, such as Adidas Running, to collaborate on hands-free experiences.

Mojo has been working with its new partners to find unique ways to improve athletes’ access to data in the moment or during. Mojo Lens can give athletes a competitive edge, allowing them to stay focused on their training or workout and maximize their performance, without the distraction of traditional wearable devices.

“Mojo has created advanced core technologies and systems that were not possible before. Innovating the new features in the lens is a huge amount of work, but successfully bringing them together in an integrated system in such a small form factor is a considerable achievement in cross-disciplinary product development,” said Mike Wiemer, co-founder and chief technology officer. . Mojo Vision official, in a statement. “We’re excited to share our progress and can’t wait to start testing Mojo Lens in real-world scenarios.”

“A lot of this last year has been trying to get everything here to work and have a form factor that works electrically,” Sinclar said. “But also, from a portability standpoint, we’ve done our best so that some of us can start using it safely.”

The company has hired several people to form the software team. And that team has been building app prototypes.

a close look

I previously saw the Mojo prototype and demo in 2019. But back then, I didn’t see much meat on the bone. It still uses a green monochrome color for all of its images, but a lot more components are built into the sides of the glass that enable things like internet connectivity, Sinclair said.

It will be based on a special gas-permeable rigid plastic contact lens, as normal plastic is not suitable for the various pieces of computer hardware that will be integrated into the device. So it’s hard and doesn’t bend. It features sensors like motion detection accelerometers, gyroscopes, and a magnetometer, as well as a custom radio for communication.

“We have taken all the elements of the system that we think can be included in the first product. And we have them integrated into a complete system embedded in the contact lens form factor and running electrically and ready to start testing,” said Sinclair. “We refer to this as our full feature lens.”

It has a power management chip, a small image sensor, and a small microprocessor.

He said: “What we showed you on that lens in 2019 had some basic imaging capabilities built in and display capabilities built in, some basic compute and antenna capabilities. One of the big changes that we made from that lens to this lens is that we went from wireless power, that is, magnetic inductive coupled power, to a true integrated battery system. So we found that magnetic coupling just didn’t provide a constant power source.”

Eventually the final product will have some way of obscuring the electronics and making it look more like a part of your eye. Eye-tracking sensors are more accurate because they reside in the eye, Sinclair said.

In the app demo, I had to look through fake glasses that showed me what you would see if you were looking through the glasses. I saw a green user interface overlaid on the real world. The green color saves energy, but the team is also working on a full-color screen for its second-generation product. The monochrome lens can display 14,000 pixels per inch, but the color screen would be denser than that.

I could look at a part of the image and essentially double-click something, activating a part of the app that took me to the app.

It had a reticle, so I knew where to aim. She could hover over an icon and look in the corner and activate the software program. Among the apps: I could watch the route of my bike ride or I could read text on a teleprompter. It wasn’t that hard to read the text. He could also use a compass to tell which direction was which.

“These are just examples of things we can build,” Sinclair said.

A detailed rundown of the features was published today in a company blog post. For software, the company will eventually create a software development kit (SDK) that others could use to build their own apps.

“This latest Mojo Lens prototype demonstrates important advances in the development of our platform and our company goals,” said Drew Perkins, CEO of Mojo Vision, in a statement. “Six years ago, we had a vision for this experience and faced a host of design and technology challenges. But we had the experience and confidence to take them on and have made consistent and groundbreaking progress over the years.”

Since 2019, Mojo Vision has been working with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) through its Innovative Devices Program, a voluntary program designed to provide safe and timely access to medical devices that can help treat irreversible debilitating diseases or conditions.

Mojo Vision has raised over $205 million in funding to date from investors including NEA, Advantech Capital, Liberty Global Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Shanda Group, Struck Capital, HiJoJo Partners, Dolby Family Ventures, HP Tech Ventures, Fusion Fund, Motorola Solutions, Edge Investments, Open Field Capital, Intellectus Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, PTC and others.