South Korean chemical engineer Jang-Ung Park is developing a contact lens with functions similar to Google Glass. The lens uses a transparent, highly conductive and stretchy mix of grapheme and silver nanowires which were tested on rabbits and found to have no bad effect after five hours of use.

The engineer from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology initially mounted a light-emitting diode on a soft contact lens that could be bought in pharmacies. He collaborated with Sung-Woo Nam of the University of Illinois to find a transparent and highly conductive material that was also flexible.

The team sandwiched silver nanowares between sheets of grapheme that resulted in a composite with lower electrical resistance of 33 ohms per square versus the industry standard of 50 ohms. It transmits 94 per cent of visible light and stretches.

They also worked with researchers at Samsung to coat the contact lens with a stretchy conductor then placed the light-emitting diode on it.

Instead of eyeball-mounted displays, Mr Nam said medical applications of electronic contact lenses may be even more promising.

Mr Park's work is not the first attempt to develop electronic contact lenses. In the past five years, several companies and researches made similar tries. Switzerland's Sensimed produced a lens for 24-hour monitoring of eye pressure for glaucoma patients, while Google Glass project founder Babak Parviz had built contact-lens displays.

But none of them use rigid or nontransparent materials. Mr Park aims to come up with contact lenses that offer all the functions of a wearable computer that will still be transparent and soft.

"Our goal is to make a wearable contact lens display that can do all the things Google Glass can do," Mr Park said.

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