A set of brass safety glasses sit on a marred black workbench. The top and earpiece sections of the frames are in squarish brass plate and have ruler marks on them.

Combination Safety Glasses And Measurement Tool

November 8, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 19 Comments

While rulers and tape measures are ubiquitous, they always seem to disappear when you need them. We know you’d never forget your safety glasses (safety first!), so what if they were also a measuring tool?

Starting by snapping pieces from a folding yardstick, [Simone Giertz] and [Laura Kampf] worked out a rough prototype before letting [Giertz] complete the project in brass. Some initial issues with the weight of the frames were alleviated by switching to a lighter weight plate material and using thinner frames and weight-saving holes near the ear pieces.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so we’ll let somebody else decide whether or not these will be the newest fashion craze. But it’s hard to argue with the timelessness of brass unless you have a copper allergy. We could definitely see a less expensive plastic version catching on in makerspaces for the PPE bin.

Want some other cool wearable gear? How about [Giertz]’s grocery bag hat, an evening gown with servo-driven flowers, or a shirt that reflects heat out the atmospheric window?

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Hack Your Eyesight With High Tech Bifocals

September 16, 2024 by Al Williams 32 Comments

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.

Bone Conducting Headphones Built Into Eye Glasses

April 18, 2019 by Jenny List 21 Comments

There are times when being seen to listen to music through headphones might get you into trouble. For these moments, reach for a handy solution: bone conduction speakers that discreetly pipe the music to your eardrums through the bone of your skull. [Samuel] wanted just such a covert music listening device, so created his own in a set of 3D-printed glasses.

He first tried using an Adafruit bone-conducting transducer but found that to be too bulky. What you see here is a smaller module that [Samuel] found on AliExpress (search for bone conduction module). The GD-02 is much smaller and thus more suitable for hiding in the arm of a pair of glasses. For the rest of the electronics he used a PCB and battery from a donated set of broken Bluetooth headphones, a space for which he was able to conceal easily in the 3D-printed frame of the glasses. The battery is in one arm and the board in the other, and he says the wiring was extremely fiddly.

The result is a surprisingly svelte set of specs that you might not immediately think concealed some electronics. His choice of bright yellow filament might give the game away, but overall he’s done a great job. This certainly isn’t the first bone conduction project we’ve shown you, some of the others have used motors instead of bone conduction transducers.

Finally, VR For Four Eyes

May 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

In the next few years, VR headsets will be everywhere, and everyone will slowly recede into their own little reality that is presented on high-resolution displays right in front of their eyes. One specific group will be left out: eyeglass wearers. VR just doesn’t work with eyeglasses, and a few people in Germany are fixing this problem. They’re creating custom prescription lenses for Google Cardboard, giving anyone with glasses the opportunity to look just a little more hipster.

The folks behind this Indiegogo already run a specialty optics shop in Germany. They have the tools to make custom lenses for spectacles, and they’re the first company so far that has identified a problem with the current crop of VR headsets and has created a solution. The campaign is for a set of lenses that can be attached to Google Cardboard with double stick tape. There are limitations on how strong of a prescription they can make, but it should work for most four eyes.

It should be noted this Indiegogo isn’t the only way to get custom lenses for a VR headset. If you have your prescription, there are a few places to buy glasses online for $30 or so. Do that, remove the lenses from the frame, and affix them to Cardboard.

Print Your Own Adjustable Lenses

March 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

[Christopher] is really going the distance with his liquid-filled 3D printed lens project. The idea is to create a bladder out of two pieces of clear plastic. It can then be filled with liquid at a variable level of pressure to curve the plastic and create an adjustable lens. He was inspired by the TED talk (which we swear we already covered but couldn’t find the post) given by [Josh Silver] on adjustable eyeglass lenses.

Don’t miss the video after the break. [Christopher] shows off the assembly process for one lens. Two 3D printed frames are pressure fit together to hold one piece of plastic wrap. Two of those assemblies are then joined with JB weld and some 3D printed clips that help to hold it. A piece of shrink tubing is used as a hose to connect a syringe to the bladder. By filling the lens assembly with water he’s able to adjust how it refracts light.

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Improve Your Vision With Computer Generated Glasses

July 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

[Vitor Pamplona] sent in a project presented at this years SIGGRAPH. It’s a piece of hardware that corrects vision without the need for lenses. Yep. software-defined eyeglasses now exist, even if the project is a bit bulky for daily wear.

[Vitor] et al came up with two versions of hardware for this project. The first is a dual stack of high-resolution LCD displays, while the second revision is an LCD with a lenticular overlay. With this hardware, the team can change the focal plane of an entire image, or just subsets of an image allowing for customized vision correction for anyone with nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, presbyopia, and even cataracts.

With plenty of head-mounted augmented reality platforms coming down the pipe such as Google’s Project Glass and a few retina displays, we could see this type of software-defined vision correction being very useful for the 75% of adults who use some form of vision correction. It may just be a small step towards the creation of a real-life VISOR, but we glasses-wearing folk will take what we can get.

You can check out the .PDF of the paper here, or watch the video after the break.

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$25 Head Mounted Display

October 7, 2007 by Will O'Brien 29 Comments

[Jake] sent in his source for a cheap head mounted display. In his writeup he notes that the spy video car comes with quite a pile of handy electronics – video tx/rx, camera and this simple black and white monocle head mounted display. (Which happens to be available as a replacement unit for a mere $20) The screen is a Kopin 300M (Black and white, 300×240 pixels) The display is actually somewhat usable out of the box, but he takes the time to note some simple mods that’ll improve the displays performance.

If you ever bought a virtual boy just to gut the display, then you know you want one. In fact, I’ve got a perfect project in mind for this particular toy.