We may be accustomed to seeing high-tech companies file patents for out-there concepts and technologies, but a new patent from Google takes the cake. Originally spotted by Forbes, Google earlier this month filed a patent which describes a method of injecting a device into a person’s eyeball as a means to correct poor vision.
If you’re at all wary about inserting a Google product into your eyeball, well, you should be. The description of the patent in question seems to be lifted straight out of a bad sci-fi book.
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Forbes explains:
[The] device is injected in fluid that then solidifies to couple the device with the eye’s lens capsule, the transparent membrane surrounding the lens. Injection would take place ”following the removal of the natural lens from the lens capsule,” the patent reads.
The planned device injected into the eye contains a number of tiny components: storage, sensors, radio, battery and an electronic lens. The eyeball device gets power wirelessly from an “energy harvesting antenna.”
Thanks, but no thanks.
Now you may be wondering why Google is patenting something like this at all. A fair question, and while Google may be primarily known for search and Android, the company has its hands in all sorts of interesting projects.
In fact, Google’s R&D initiatives were so broad that the company this past August felt compelled to completely reorganize itself under a completely new name: Alphabet. As part of the restructuring, Google’s disparate divisions became wholly owned subsidiaries under the Alphabet umbrella.
One of the subsidiaries created as a result was Verily, effectively Google’s Life Sciences division. As the company’s webpage explains, Verily is primarily concerned with “bringing together technology and life sciences to uncover new truths about health and disease.”
And we can now thank Verily for the terrifying patent above.
