Sony has filed a patent for a contact lens capable of taking photos and recording video.
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Able to zoom and focus automatically to get the best shots, the camera would be controlled by winks, according to the patent. A user would close their eye and press the lid with their finger to activate the lens, then close and open their eye in certain ways to command certain functions.
The lens would connect wirelessly to a phone or other device to transmit the images.
Sony is just the latest company to put forward a plan for futuristic optical devices.
Google holds multiple patents for smart contact lenses, and was the first to announce its intention to make one in 2014. Its Lens Project is designed to take constant glucose readings to aid diabetics.
Swiss researchers last year unveiled a comparatively low-tech contact lens with a built-in telescope that lets the vision impaired zoom in with a wink.
A Samsung patent revealed a few weeks ago outlined a contact lens similar to Sony's, which would be able to track eye movement and project augmented reality images onto your eye, somewhat like a hyper-minimised version of Microsoft's Hololens headset.
But Sony's patent may describe the most aspirational design yet, including a limited amount of storage on the lens itself.
Bringing the proposed technology fully into Black Mirror territory, Sony's patent also describes an attached 'display unit' that would apparently play your own images and video back onto your eye. Of course the technology seen in the British TV show recorded your entire life and could be controlled with a handheld device rather than a series of spasmodic winks, features not described in Sony's patent.
As always it's important to note that a patent is never indicative of a product coming to market anytime soon. It remains unclear whether Sony actually has the technology to fit a camera, Wi-Fi antenna and processor, CPU, storage and associated sensors and circuits onto the top side of a person's eyeball, let alone a display that could play the footage back to them.
It's also unclear how Sony would mitigate the issue of lens wearers surreptitiously recording those around them for later scrutiny or dissemination, which was a major criticism of Google's Glass.
