BELLEVUE, Wash., Sept. 11, 2019 — Innovega Inc. announced and described the experimental proof of their technology for managing the primary accepted cause of eye discomfort and visual fatigue when using Virtual and Augmented Reality displays. The results of the experiment support the ability of the iOptik® contact lens when used with Innovega eyewear to deliver the required depth of field to eliminate the offending vergence-accommodation conflict. Innovega Director of Opto-electronics and Photonics Mark Freeman, PhD and Vice President of Engineering Jay Marsh, MSME have published an update to their white paper to provide the methods, results, and conclusions.
Dr. Freeman commented, “The new video that we’ve included gives a quantifiable measure of acuity and depth of field using the iOptik® smart contact lens. Unlike the optics used in competing eyewear, the long depth of field and accommodation invariance of Innovega’s technology can remove the discomfort associated with viewing 3D AR and VR displays. The wearer of Innovega lenses and eyewear will be able to verge their eyes to any distance needed to fuse the stereo content into a 3D image, and their eyes can focus to this same depth as is natural and comfortable. Display content remains in focus independent of the depth at which the wearer is focusing.”
Co-author Jay Marsh added, “We are pleased to demonstrate the extended depth of field of our contact lens-enabled eyewear. This proves that Innovega’s contact lens technology keeps the display in focus over the full depth range needed for 3D AR and VR platforms.”
“This feature eliminates a major challenge faced by developers of augmented and virtual reality eyewear. We have proved that our next generation contact lenses will deliver content that is always in focus without relying on the management of multiple display planes or active refocusing,” said Steve Willey, Innovega Co-Founder, President and CEO. Willey added, “We look forward to delivering this valuable benefit to our prospective partners, along with application and content developers.”
About Innovega
Innovega Inc. is developing stylish, lightweight, wearable displays that feature a high-resolution, panoramic-field-of-view system for medical, consumer, and industrial application. The Company is licensing its technology into the $74 billion global vision care market with a focus on image enhancement for the visually impaired. Its transformative patented platform, eMacula™, includes eyewear and iOptik® high-resolution smart contact lenses that work together to deliver broad application in medicine, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). The Company has been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Eye Institute (NEI) of National Institutes of Health (NIH), and National Science Foundation (NSF) and has received investments from strategic partners. The iOptik contact lens is in the FDA De Novo process Phase II clinical trials in progress. The Company is also pursuing FDA 510(k) Clearance for its lens material.
