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REEL TO REAL ► Mission: Impossible Augmented Reality Contact Lenses Developed By Microsoft & University of Washington

The Gadget Helpline‘s REEL TO REAL is a new regular feature to the blog, aimed at tech and film fanatics, which will reveal how the sci-fi and futuristic gadgets we see on screen in movies and television are making their way into real-life. Take a seat, grab your popcorn and enjoy the show!

If you’ve seen the latest Mission: Impossible movie, Ghost Protocol, you may remember the character played by Jeremy Renner (Aaron Cross/Kenneth Gidson), who before a negotiation with a terrorist pops in a contact lens which relays information to him and allows him to photograph documents unsuspectingly. Pretty cool bit of kit, and one of the more believable scenes in the outlandish action thriller. And you’d better believe that the reality of this tech is not that far away..

Microsoft and the University of Washington are in the finishing stages of putting together a set of augmented reality lens which fit over the human eye and deliver a vast range of information in front of the cornea, such as directions or specific details of an item in a store. Useless with names but good at remembering faces? No problem. These lenses could potentially bring up a person’s identity and personal details simply by facial recognition. A new video from Microsoft research shows simplified examples of this in action, as well as showing off the tech and its application.

Using minute glucose sensors, as used in diabetes testing, Microsoft claims they can also link the lenses to software applications through its Windows platform as well as tablets and smartphones. We’ll be bringing up additional features in our apps in a blink of an eye and all thanks to research performed on rabbits, as we previously reported.

The Washington based computing and tech-company is planning to get this out on the consumer market “as soon as everything is ready” and since they claim they are close to completion we don’t need to focus too hard to see this one’s just ahead of us.

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