According to Wired, the Department of Defense is investing $3.5 million into research in dynamic lens which can correct one's eyesight to better than 20/20.

At the heart of PixelOptics' technology are tiny, electronically-controlled pixels embedded within a traditional eyeglass lens. Technicians scan the eyeball with an aberrometer – a device that measures aberrations that can impede vision – and then the pixels are programmed to correct the irregularities.

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Thanks to technologies created for astronomical telescopes and spy satellites, aberrometers can map a person's eye with extreme accuracy. Lasers bounce off the back of the eyeball, and structures in the eye scatter the resulting beam of light.

Software reads the scattered beam and creates a map of the patient's eye, including tiny abnormalities such as bumps, growths and valleys. The pixelated eyeglass lens is then tuned to refract light in a way that corrects for those high-level aberrations.

The plan is to have the glasses measure the environment, including air pressure, lighting conditions, altitude, where your eyeballs are actually looking, the rate at which tears evaporate in your eyes, etc. and adjust the lens dynamically, all without moving parts

Initially, the product will be released as glasses, with plans to develop contact-lens versions, and intra-ocular lens (i.e. surgically implanting into the eye).

Unfortunately, this technology still relies on the (primitive) system of actually projecting light onto the retina. I'm looking forward to the day when the articial eyes can communicate directly with one's brain. Ideally, artificial eyes would be implanted into babies at birth, and the brain would quickly "learn" to interpret the data that it's receiving from this new organ.

When we get rid of the retina as a middle-man, we open the door to a wider spectrum of visible light. One could, for example, have an artificial eye that can see infra-red, ultra-violet, perhaps even x-rays.