These Contact Lenses Make Life Colorful for the Color Blind

Frequency-filtering sunglasses have been the go-to fix when it comes to some types of color blindness – but two engineers in Israel have found a way to implement color-correcting films directly onto contact lenses!

The prototype contact lenses, which could restore colors in people with visual impairments, were created by engineers Sharon Karepov and Tal Ellenbogen from Tel Aviv University to offer a customized process for a variety of deficiencies and to improve the overall market in color blindness therapy.

“Our contact lenses use metasurfaces based on nano-metric size gold ellipses to create a customised, compact and durable way to address these deficiencies,” says Karepov. “This new fabrication process opens the door for embedding metasurfaces into other non-flat substrates as well.”

Metasurfaces, the key properties to the engineers’ filtering technology, are surface variations that change the way light reflects or enters a material. Etching contact lenses with such metasurfaces can help those with color blindness see colors a lot closer to how most human eyes see them.