During the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) that took place in California last February 13, 2015, a group of researchers went ahead and presented lenses with built-in zoom.
This is the upgraded version of the first zoom-in lenses that was designed back in 2013. The lens is 1.55 mm. thick with a telescopic component that gets activated with the wink of an eye and the lens is able to magnify any object up to 2.8 times.
The lenses only function when the wearer winks with one eye. To turn on the zoom function, the wearer should wink his right eye and whenever he wants to turn it off, he would just wink the left eye and the lenses would go back to the normal sight mode.
This research started because of the Pentagon funding but was initially created to come up with a kind of bionic vision for use of soldiers. The lenses with built-in zoom were originally created for the army and their costs will be lowered for them to be more affordable for as many people as possible.