Humans are pretty fragile. A bad break in your hip can mean surgery and months of rehab. That’s pretty bad, but what if you fall and break your hip on the Moon, or even Mars?

Luckily for our Mars-bound descendants, the European Space Agency has a solution: an information-loaded assisted reality helmet that will let anyone identify and perform minor surgery to repair injuries.

The Computer Assisted Medical Diagnosis and Surgery System, CAMDASS, is a wearable augmented reality helmet that injects computer generated models and information directly into the wearer’s field of view.

“Binoculars and night-vision goggles have their limits. So DARPA is doing work at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks to create wearable eye lenses with tiny, full-color displays onto which digital images can be projected, to give soldiers better situational awareness. The lenses would allow users to focus simultaneously on images that are both close up (perhaps a display) and far away (perhaps a battlefield.) Using virtual reality technologies to improve how soldiers perform on the battlefield has been a particular interest of the U.S. military for some

COMMENTS:
It looks like it may be similar to Innovega’s display at CES. Details (heavy in the marketing gloss) are available here. [innovega-inc.com]

To summarize, the human eye is pretty bad at focusing on things nearby. Close one eye and hold your hand a couple inches in front of the other, and you’ll see what I mean. In order to get around this so far, all the augmented reality glasses you refer to need to use some tricks to make it seem like the image is farther away than it really is. This makes the screens bulkier, more expensive, etc. The idea here is to create a contact lens onto which you can project an image so that it gets superimposed on one’s vision, in focus, without any trickery, thus simplifying the design and allowing the AR devices to be lighter, cheaper, maybe use less power, and so on.

Electronic Contact Lens Displays Pixels On the Eye
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/24/0354208/electronic-contact-lens-displays-pixels-on-the-eye

Electronic contact lens displays pixels on the eyes
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/11/electronic-contact-lens-displa.html

The future of augmented-reality technology is here – as long as you’re a rabbit. Bioengineers have placed the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into the eyes of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans. The bunnies suffered no ill effects, the researchers say.

“We have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radiofrequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit,” says a US and Finnish team led by Babak Praviz of the University of Washington in Seattle.

“This verifies that antennas, radio chips, control circuitry, and micrometre-scale light sources can be integrated into a contact lens and operated on live eyes.”