Glasses are made of, well, glasses. Their main objective is either to protect your eyes or to correct your vision. These products are, of course, made for the latter use. Although the magnifying glasses dates back to early Egyptian periods, the first invention of wearable glasses is credited to Salvino D'Armate from 13th century. The history of first traditional eyeglasses is desputable, but it is not the topic of our post. The primary objective of glasses is to deal with cases of hyperopia (farsightedness) and myopia (nearsightedness), where, respectively, convex and concave lenses are used. There has been lot of development (tweaking to the product) to the design as well as lenses of the glasses over long period of time. The present design dates back to 18th century, whereas the lens technology goes back to early stages of last century. Matching to the beginning of 21st century, there is now some tweaking to the fundamentals of the lens technology and to some extent to its design.
The first product I want to discuss is made for the masses at lower income side. There are various methods in modern era for eye correction. Over half an earth's population is poor and largest number of it is in need for proper eyeglasses. Not only their daily life, but also their only source of income depends on their ability to see things correctly. They can't afford simple eyeglasses, forget about contact lenses and expensive laser operations. They still depend on donated or used eyeglasses. These donated eyeglasses cannot be flexible to cover such huge masses with different degree of eyesight defects. Self-adjusting lenses seems to be very affordable solution which can well be adjusted to different needs of the patient as well as different situations they are in, e.g. for working, for reading, for driving, etc. The cheapest solution has been found by Joshua Silver, an Oxford physicist, who developed very simple, but very authentic eyeglasses where lenses can be self-adjusted. He is leading a center for vision at the University of Oxford, which is making this technology available to the needy people. There are many technologies one can use for adjustable lenses. The most popular is the fluid-filled adjustable lenses technology. As the official website says: Fluid-filled lenses use the incompressibility of liquids to change the physical shape of the lens. The lens is constructed with two flexible membranes on the optical surfaces, held in place by a solid surround. You can see that in the picture above. At the moment one pair of eyeglasses cost $19, but with the mass production, it is supposed to go down to $2. Like the cheap mobile phones were created for the masses in the developing countries, this product has really good future. And nonetheless, it is one of the best cost-effective solution for the benefits of the billions.
The second product is at the moment thought for the niché market. It is also based on self-adjusting fluid-filled lens technology. It functions almost the same way like the one above. It works with one firm and one flexible lenses. Flexible lens is made of rigid surface and one transparent membrane, which is filled with clear fluid. This creates an effect of another lens with different focal length. The advantage is that with the different shape of the lenses, you have different zoom function for different situation. There is no need to change your glasses. Well, this one is made really for the people at far extreme of their personal income. The pair of eyeglasses from TruFocals is going to cost 45 times more than the ones from Joshua Silver. It looks more sleek and elegant. And the frame is made of metal. All in all, it is definitely made for selected few. But I still respect the quality of innovation. At least, there's one difference between two products. The former one is equipped with two membrane, whereas the latter one has only one membrane film. Technically it is a great innovation. You can see the demonstration of the technology on their website.
Interestingly, both of these products have same retro design, which is kind of ironic considering scale of innovation, perhaps it is satirical challenge to the well established eyeglasses developers. The feat is almost like that of four-third camera Olympus EP-1 with cutting-edge technology, but retro-design of old rangefinders like Leica. This new tweaking to the fundamental principle of the eyeglasses is a very welcome move. The idea is so simple that I hope one day it makes fixed lenses bifocal eyeglasses obsolete. The entertaining ones visual senses does not demand such sophistication as needed in photography where fixed-lenses are still a gem. There are some limitations to fluid-filled lens solution. Nonetheless, it still manages to satisfy the needs of over 80% of the people with eyesight problems. It is the product which can be mass-produced with the same design and can be customized after selling it. It adds dramatically to the productivity of a person which can be felt at macro level of the economy indirectly. Honestly, there are very few such simple solutions to unnoticed problem.
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- Twitter Snapshot: Josh Silver's global vision for vision (ted.com)
- Bright ideas (guardian.co.uk)
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