Color Changing Contacts: A New Look
Anime, which is Japanese animation, has taken off and become super popular in America nowadays. We see superb anime being created such as “Demon Slayer”, which as the name suggests is about killing demons, and “Haikyuu!”, a volleyball anime. With these popular animes being created here and there, many events are held to celebrate or represent anime such as Comicon, Anime Expo, Otaku Con, and more. Many people at these events like to dress up as some of their favorite characters from an anime, which we call cosplay. Cosplaying takes a lot of effort to pull off though. You need to consider that character design, how they dress and then recreate the character's entire wardrobe to fit you in real life. One essential uniqueness of a character is their eyes. Many anime characters have different eye colors and most of the time, that is what makes each character different. To achieve this, many cosplayers spend an absurd amount of money buying colored contacts, ranging from 12 dollars to 90 dollars for a month's worth of supply. But what if they did not need to do that? What if cosplayers, or anyone interested, could just pay one time to obtain a contact lens that could change colors for you?
Introducing the Color Changing Contacts (CCC), contacts that upon voice command, change to the color that the user specifies. By applying the contacts to your eyes and activating the system from your phone, you could directly speak to the application or select the color from a color wheel provided from the app, and change the color of your eyes at a moment's notice. No hassle, no spending tons of money trying to obtain different eye colors, just simplicity, and ease of use. Based upon what the person wants they could even get a unique design for their eyes from online, like the sharingan pattern from “Naruto”. The way that would work is that the user would be able to go online and crop a picture of just the eye to upload into the application. The application would detect the eye shape and therefore use only the parts that would make up the sharingan or whatever the design of the eye was. This way, we can ensure that cosplayers or anyone interested in changing up their style can have an easy time dressing up and expressing themselves and their love for anime.
This contact lens idea was drawn from the idea of cosplaying as well as color-changing lights that we see around us today. I have a light bulb that can change color based on a remote that I have, and I wondered if that could apply to contact lens as well. I realized how technologizing eyewear has long since been in the game, with the Google Glass making its first appearance in 2013. With these contacts, I took a part of the color-changing lightbulb and had it work through an application on one’s smartphone to work with the lens that would be the device is shown. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the device would activate when you go on the application on your phone and turn it on. After syncing with your phone, the device would change colors based on what is selected on the app, much like how the lightbulb changes color based on a microcontroller. Research has not been done to see if we can fit a microcontroller in something as thin and small as a contact lens but there are possibilities that this can be done in the future with more tools and resources.
Like I mentioned before, there are implications that this device can be improved to be a better tool for many and not just for cosplayers or those who want to change their looks. Future improvements can be a multitude of different functionalities being added. Some functions that could be added to the lens that would make the device be more versatile and useful would probably be GPS, blurriness adjustment, and camera.
With GPS, the users can navigate through different areas of an unknown town with a projected map showing directions on their contacts. This is helpful for cosplayers that travel to different conventions as it allows them to get to their convention safely and swiftly. This could also help any other user navigate through any other places that may be foreign to them as well.
Adjusting blurriness just goes with the user’s eye prescription and how well they can see in daily life. The user will be able to go into the CCC app and adjust the blurriness from there. You could also insert your prescription in the app and the lens will automatically adjust to your senses once you upload that information.
Lastly, the camera option would allow the user to capture different moments at different events. I remember watching a Black Mirror episode about people being able to capture and rewatch memories. The same concept applies to the lens where the user would be able to take pictures by entering the camera feature through the application and then blinking to capture the photo. By having the user activate the camera feature through the app, it gets rid of the trouble of taking random pictures whenever you blink.
The color-changing lens (CCC) will be useful to cosplayers as it will offer features that would make creating cosplay and going to conventions so much easier. With the options of changing eye color, GPS that shows you the direction towards a convention, and even being able to take pictures with the camera function makes your adventure that much more exciting. This does not just apply to cosplayers; this applies to everyone. This lens device can be useful for nearly everyone and with the future improvements and newly added functions, I can see this device taking off in the near future.
