Why a smart contact lens is the ultimate wearable

Smart contact lenses sound like science fiction. But there's already a race to develop technology for the contact lenses of the future — ones that will give you super-human vision and will offer heads-up displays, video cameras, medical sensors and much more. In fact, these products are already being developed.

Sounds unreal, right? But it turns out that eyeballs are the perfect place to put technology.

Smart contact lenses are like implants but they don't require surgery and can usually be removed or inserted by the user. They're neither on nor under the skin full time. They're exposed to both air and the body's internal chemistry.

Contact lenses sit on the eye, and so can enhance vision. They're exposed to both light and the mechanical movement of blinking, so they can harvest energy.

The latest Verily smart contact lens is actually injected into the eyeball, according to a recently published patent. So it's less of a contact lens and more of a surgical implant.

Verily is headed by Andrew Jason Conrad, who is also the inventor of the lens.

The process is vaguely gruesome: Your natural lens is removed from your eyeball. A fluid is then injected into the eye, and that fluid fuses with the eye's lens capsule as it solidifies. Inside this new, artificial lens lives storage, battery, sensors, a radio and other electronics. The artificial lens would take over the job of focusing light onto the retina, improving vision in numerous ways without glasses, but in a flexible, interactive way.