Experimenting with “Cyborg Eyeball” Contact Lenses

Everyone knows that the tell-tale sign of a cyborg is glowing eyes — they’re a dead giveaway that someone has undergone cybernetic augmentation. It’s such a common sight in sci-fi that providing a list of every movie, book, and video game that features glowing cyborg eyes would take up the rest of this article. Usually, that’s meant to indicate that the entire eyeball has been replaced, but it would also be cool just to have glowing contact lenses. And that’s exactly what Christopher Herrmann’s Cyborg Eyeball Project is aiming for.

Before we go any further, we need to get a disclaimer out of the way: don’t try this yourself. You’ll probably scratch your cornea and blind yourself. Then you’ll have to explain to your doctor why you were trying to shove LEDs into your eyeball, and that’s an awkward conversation nobody wants to have. Alright, on to the project!

Like many projects, this one started with a classic “what if?” conversation. In this case, what if you could make your eyes light up like in a sci-fi movie? The goal here isn’t to provide some sort of display that only you can see, but rather to make your eyes emit light. Herrmann hasn’t quite accomplished that yet, but the work he’s done so far is still very interesting.

The construction is simple: a small, flexible PCB ring designed in Autodesk Eagle and ordered from OSHPark has several tiny 602 SMD LEDs soldered around its perimeter. That’s then sandwiched between two commercial contact lenses. Herrmann did manage to jam the makeshift contact lens into his friend’s eye, but it didn’t fit well. His next step is to try and make the finished lens much thinner and more comfortable, and then he’ll experiment with getting power to the LEDs.