As we get older, our eyes get worse. That’s just a fact of life. It is a rite of passage the first time you leave the eye doctor with a script for “progressive” lenses which are just fancy bifocals. However, a new high-tech version of bifocals promises you better vision, but with a slight drawback, as [Sherri L. Smith] found.
Remember how users of Google Glass earned the nickname “glassholes?” Well, these new bifocals make Google Glass look like a fashion statement. If you are too young to need them, bifocals account for the fact that your eyes need different kinds of help when you look close up (like soldering) or far away (like at an antenna up on a roof). A true bifocal has two lenses and you quickly learn to look down at anything close up and up to see things far away. Progressives work the same, but they transition between the two settings instead of having a discrete mini lens at the bottom.
The new glasses, the ViXion01 change based on what you are looking for. They measure range and adjust accordingly. For $555, or a monthly rental, you can wear what looks like a prototype for a Star Trek visor and let it deduce what you are looking at and change its lenses accordingly.
Of course, this takes batteries that last about ten hours. It also requires medical approval to be real glasses and it doesn’t have that, yet. Honestly, if they worked well and didn’t look so dorky, the real use case might be allowing your eye doctor to immediately download a new setting as your vision changes. How about you? How much odd headgear are you willing to wear in public and why?
Glasses have a long strange history. While a university prototype we saw earlier was not likely to win fashion awards, they did look better than these. Maybe.
There’s an even bigger (or smaller?) drawback: it appears that the active lens is just that tiny thing right in front of the the field of view, which means that you will have lots of trouble with lateral vision.
Know how you just move your eyes left to right to scan your big monitors at work? Forget about that, your neck will have to do that for you instead, while your eyes remain pointing forward on your face.
I have a set of progressives on a nice big frame, and still can’t use them for work (three monitores wrap around about 120 degrees). I have dedicated reading glasses that I use for work, because with them I can keep my head stationary and just scan the side monitors as needed. Can’t do that with progressives and this contraption, for the looks of it, would be two orders of magnitude worse.
I have similar issues because I tend not to move my head at multiple monitors I shift my eyes and with progressive lenses even with the widest ones you can get it still doesn’t work well.
I’ll second having dedicated glasses. I have a set for computer, a set for reading, and a set of progressives.
Initially the eye doctor didn’t want to give me glasses corrected to a specific distance like I asked, he gave me what he thought I needed instead. Two years later on the next appointment I asked him what good are glasses if I don’t use them, because the ones he gave me weren’t what I asked for.
Then he gave me what I asked for, and I’ve been using them ever since. Fixed focal distance to the screen, 19 inches, used a tape measure.
I’ll never get progressives again. JFC, trying to read with these is a complete PITA. There’s a narrow vertical strip where everything is in focus, and things left or right are out of focus. I have to twist my head left and right just to scan lines of text in a book.
Driving is now a terrifying experience, because trucks in my peripheral vision appear to be inches away from my vehicle.
Rectangles look like trapezoids now, and this is a complete PITA for someone who likes to, you know, make things and have everything meet at right angles.
I’ll never get progressives again. Waiting for my next appointment to get ‘grampa glasses, bifocals, and be done with progressives forever.
Yeah, I couldn’t cope with progressives making nothing square, never mind nothing except a spot being in focus.
Same deal with the optometrist. I can calculate my own prescription for the glasses from the optometrists readings, it’s trivial.
I ordered a range of prescriptions from CN in cheap frames to find what the best working distance was for me by test.
Yep. It’s shocking how bad progressives are. I’ve tried many, from drugstore ones to expensive prescription ones. The field of view in the reading range is only a couple of inches wide, not even wide enough to cover a paperback book page before degrading into double images at the sides.
It makes sense to have dedicated lenses for a very large monitor or three monitor setup. I know a few people that get dedicated glasses for work.
For those with issues with progressives, you may need a better optometrist. Of course everyone’s vision is different and some things work better for some people than others, but a decent optometrist and optician shop should not make you pay for lenses that don’t work for you.
Personally, I find progressives are best with the start of the optical shift set a few millimeters lower than the default. The continuous adjustment available with a slight head tilt is a feature for me. With an appropriate prescription, I can read a full magazine page at a comfortable distance, and work at a decent size monitor or two with minimal movement. And while driving, the lower shift keeps the transition below the instruments on the dash.
From reading these comments, I’m glad that I’ve been avoiding progressive lenses. My solution so far has been to use normal single-vision glasses, plus a set of reading-glasses that I’ve modified to hang in front of the normal ones. Essentially, I’ve just removed the temple pieces and the nose pads, leaving them to hang only from the (bent out) nose arms.
At the moment, I just use +0.25 magnification for the reading glasses, and I mostly just need to use them at the computer, where they usually reside. I had also tried a set of clamp-on, flip-up magnifying glasses, but they were just too heavy and bulky for comfortable use. I’d like to find something similar, but light and sleek.
I didn’t care for the progressives I tried. Fortunately, I have a very mild prescription for distance vision, so I can get by without them, for the most part. I use two different levels of reading glasses – one with my doctor’s prescription for reading books, and a slightly weaker prescription for working at a monitor.
I could not get used to my pair of very expensive varifocals as we call them in the UK and gave up on them despite the cost, prefering my out-of-prescription old fixed focals. But when I sat on the old pair during a covid lockdown period I was forced to wear the new ones for several weeks.
Now I wouldn’t like to be without them!
I do use my multifocals (as they are called here) when I’m out and about, but for computer use and reading I have a dedicated fixed focus pair. It is not that I cannot use the multifocals, it is just that for working on a monitor or even reading, the narrow near focus is too annoying, I need to keep adjusting my head to scan.
These things look like they are using $50 (high quantity pricing) worth of Corning’s Varioptic liquid lenses (or similar) and a $5 rangefinder. $555 is a stretch.
They do look like the Corning lenses but I’m not seeing them for less than $100 to $150 each and then another $100 to $150 for a control board. Miniaturise that and then add a tiny range finder and put it all in a rechargeable wearable and $555 seems pretty cheap to me. If you can figure out how to source and build all of that $55 you should do it.
…and then package them into a reasonably sleek frame (which at least doesn’t look like an IED), have a professional write the software, add a battery from a legit supplier so it doesn’t go Samsung on you, and apply for medical approval.
Yeah, that totally sounds like $55.
The very narrow height of the lenses is kind of a bummer, and based on the description it doesn’t seem to do what I would probably find valuable which is give us a way to manually pick a zoom level for a close-up work. Also the glasses should be smart enough that if I’m looking at text it should be able to adjust the focus and focal length to a point where the text is legible with a little bit of tuning. So go through a training session where you look at text you want to read at the distance you want to read it at and then make manual adjustments in the app do this with several kinds of text over time and haven’t learned that when you’re aiming up text that’s saying one to two points it needs to zoom x amount. If they became that adaptive you may not even need an eye doctor.
I don’t think the glasses are source of the “huge dork” issue. If I wore these they would look totally cool.
Perhaps you are a big dork and don’t know it!
B^)
Ill just keep waiting patiently for the Jellisee IOL to finish human trials and get FDA approval. Till then its monofocal contacts and readers for me.
I’ll just keep waiting for Retnox 5.
I hope it’s a winner. Symphony and ReSTOR lenses both held big promises and didn’t quite deliver.
ReSTOR uses a multifocal lens which gives several different zones of focal length relying on the brain to pick and choose where to steer the eye to hit the sweet spot for any particular distance.
Symphony uses an extended depth of focus lens, This is accomplished by using ring shaped lenses to focus light from different distances down to a common focal point all at once.
Both of these options create issues due to their lack of dynamic adjustability.
Jellisee IOLs take a different approach. While there are several Accommodating IOLs in the pipeline that attempt to do this. Jellisee stands out among them as rather than using paired lenses and a mechanical system to attain variations of focal length, the Jellisee IOLs uses cilliary muscle contraction to displace fluid from a series of small bellowed reservoirs around the periphery into a flexible central lens changing the focal length dynamically. The system requires very little contraction to cover the full natural range of focus. The results in early human trials have been very promising.
Id rather not end up with CrystaLens (the only FDA approved AIOL) or one of the other multipiece mechanical options. Im pretty hopeful that by the time I really NEED it, Jellisee will be FDA approved.
I think a more socially acceptable alternative to a face mounted camera-looking range finder would be to use the users eyes themselves as the range finder; just use eye tracking to get the parallax and fine tune the focus from that. That way there’s nothing facing outward that looks like a camera so you don’t have to worry as much about setting off the village NPCs. Or maybe have a few fixed focus presets and touch points on the arms to switch between them.
If you could use the parallax of the eyes to focus (mechanical rangefinders do use parallax) could you also track the eye position (i.e. look up) in order to position the correction?
Let’s start with a steampunk version with prism based rangefinder and geared stepper motors to position the corrective element i to line of sight.
See, we’ve been telling you that anything can be done with 555 (dollars, in this case)!
B^)
I award you 1 Internet Point!
When you add electric control, might as well have a few more elements so that it can zoom in on electronics parts :)
So what you’re saying is, bifocals have discrete close up lenses, while progressives have discreet ones?
And you even used an apostrophe correctly. Kudos.
Ridiculously expensive!
@Al Williams said: “As we get older, our eyes get worse. That’s just a fact of life. It is a rite of passage the first time you leave the eye doctor with a script for “progressive” lenses which are just fancy bifocals.”
In my case the opposite was true. I had age-related cataracts that got so bad I was becoming functionally blind. At the time I was living and working in a third-world country where corrective transplants were not a practical option. So I had to travel to a developed country where corrective surgery was an option. I had both eyes operated on at the same time. The improvement was immediately life changing! The ophthalmic surgeon had me rest for a few more days and come back for some follow-up tests. When everything checked out OK, he allowed me to travel again. Then with my new pair of eyes, I flew home. That was many years ago. Today, sometimes I need to wear non-prescription reading glasses once in a while (needed for reading very fine print), but only occasionally. Seeing anything far away never requires any glasses. I see better now than ever before.
@Al Williams said: ‘Remember how users of Google Glass earned the nickname “glassholes?”’
It wasn’t just using the Google Glass that earned you the name “glasshole”, it was the constant threat of you recording people without their permission that made you a “glasshole”.
“As we get older, our eyes get worse.”
Not always – my eyes have gotten better as I’ve aged. I can now drive/fly legally without glasses.
Runs in the family – according to my opthamologist it’s more common than most people think. Effectively the farsightedness of age can cancel out nearsighted vision to a large degree. The penalty? My close-focus distance has gotten a bit longer (to ~25 cm or so), so it seems a fair trade.
These are kind of neat, but I feel like the kind of glasses that you adjust with a knob to change the entire FOV at once would be a nicer experience and still fine to automate. (It shouldn’t be any unusual thing for an autofocus system to turn something to obtain focus.) But also, pinhole glasses and/or a bright light are often used when less accomodation is needed and someone doesn’t want to lose most of their FOV.