Podcast Notes: Mojo Vision's AR contact lenses

Every Thursday, we summarize an AR/VR podcast to save you time and keep you up-to-date. This week features Steve Sinclair, the SVP of product at Mojo Vision, which enables invisible computing with their AR contact lenses.

Steve speaks with Jason McDowall of the AR Show about the technology behind the lens and who could use it [Note: Questions and answers were edited for brevity and clarity.]

Jason: What is the big vision for Mojo Vision?

Steve says it's a pretty audacious vision. People are asking what's next after the proliferation of the smartphone in the last decade. A lot of people believe it will be an AR/VR solution, which Mojo believes as well. The big vision is how do you build that next wave of computing in a way that delivers on the promise of having real-time information at our fingertips? he asks.

Steve says Mojo's vision is to have invisible computing, where the technology offers information when you need it but fades into the background when you don't. Mojo is building a platform on the idea of a smart contact lens, which is virtually invisible and extremely mobile. You can wear and use it anywhere. You want to be smarter than today's smartphones and help people focus on the real world and people around them while still having access to the information they need.

The company's first product, the Mojo Lens, is a smart contact lens with an embedded micro-LED display. It's a device you wear directly on your eyeball that delivers the type of capabilities that we imagine being associated with AR.

Jason: What gives you the confidence that what you are creating is possible?

Steve says you have to look at problems like this as opportunities. Other companies in AR are trying to take a smartphone or smartwatch and strap it to your eyes for a spatial computing paradigm that's just not there yet. Mojo is taking a different approach, which is building the ultimate display to wear all day long and get the information when you need it.

One of Mojo's co-founders, Michael Deering, was the head of 3D graphics at Sun Microsystems for years. He pioneered quite a few AR/VR systems. Upon retirement, he set out to create the ultimate display and discovered that it's one that matches the resolution of the human eye. The best way to match the resolution of the eye is to get as close to it as you can, Steve says. You don't need millions of pixels on the display in order to see something at high fidelity. If you can get close enough to the eye, you can deliver that same high fidelity with a much fewer number of pixels, which means less compute and power.

Jason: What is it exactly that you've created at this point?

Steve says the company demonstrated in January a prototype of its Mojo Lens with a micro-LED display embedded inside a scleral lens...