The Future Eyeglasses
According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75% of American adults use some sort of vision correction. About 64% of them wear eyeglasses, and about 11% wear contact lenses, either exclusively, or with glasses. The number is even higher with people over 50 years old where 90% use reading or visual aid. Which means 9 out of 10 people are likely to use glasses after their 50’s.
Pharmacies and drugstores are permitted to sell glasses for purposes like reading, no need for a prescription to buy those kinds of glasses.
How does the eye work?
Before we start talking about eyeglasses, we need to understand how our eyes work. To see an object is to receive the light rays that this object returns to our eyes. The iris, the colored part of the eye, in blue, green or brown, lets in more or less light through the black orifice of the eye, the pupil. When we are in direct sunlight, the pupil narrows so that we are not dazzled.
The cornea and the lens, at the front of the eye, direct the light rays onto the retina where the image of the object is formed. The mechanism of a camera uses this same principle: the lenses in the objective, the aperture or diaphragm, to bring in the light and the film where the image is formed. The image formed in the eye: the retina sends a coded message to your brain via the optic nerve. Almost instantly, the brain interprets what we see!
How do eyeglasses work?
Now that we understand how our eyes work, we need to know how the eyeglasses work. Eyeglasses are used to correct eye pathology. If you have a vision problem, you may need to wear glasses to correct the problem. Pathologies cannot be treated with glasses.
Anyone with a visual disorder (myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism), the light rays do not refract correctly on the retina, the eye cannot produce a clear image because it cannot focus. This is where corrective lenses come in. Their role is to correct the refraction of light, so that it is done correctly on the retina.
You are myopic (near-sighted)? You have difficulty seeing from afar. Your visual correction requires concave corrective lenses to diverge the light rays and focus them in the right place. The greater your correction, the greater the curvature of the concave glass, the thicker the glasses around the periphery.
Conversely, if you are farsighted, you have trouble seeing close-up objects. Your lenses are convex to bend the rays inward and allow the light to converge to correct vision. The greater the correction, the thicker the lenses in the center.
Smart eyeglasses
Smart glasses are capable of automatically detecting the “subject” fixed by its wearer, and automatically focusing on it. A way to make the world around the visually impaired clear, especially people with presbyopia.
To remedy this, Stanford University has thus put in place several prototypes of smart glasses called autofocals. Glasses with autofocal lenses, this is not new since we had already seen a frame equipped with a button to automatically switch from a near view to a far view, and vice versa, but also a system with sensors inside the branches.
A solution that is an alternative to progressive lenses for presbyopes, and on the Stanford side, researchers have decided to go even further with glasses that focus automatically, without the slightest button. How is it possible? Thanks to an eye tracking technology directly integrated into the lenses of the frames. Lenses automatically inflate and expand. In fact, the glass adapts the type of correction according to the movements of the eye! Concretely, the glass works on the same principle as the lens, with glasses filled with liquid which swell and expand as the field of vision changes. It also includes eye tracking sensors that triangulate where the person is looking and determine the precise distance from the object being viewed. At Stanford University, the researchers focused more precisely on working on the software part which processes information in real time to keep the glasses filled with liquid and to carry out a perfect and permanent focusing. Supported by giants of the digital world such as Intel and nVidia, this pair of smart glasses project currently takes the form of a virtual reality mask, but the objective is indeed to transform it into everyday glasses because Presbyopia affects more than a billion people, according to Gordon Wetzstein, electrical engineer at Stanford.
Benefits of smart glasses
A single pair of glasses for your entire life. This is a one-time purchase that would save the patient money. The patient wouldn’t need other glasses during his life since the glasses will be able to adjust his vision through his entire life. This one pair of glasses could serve the patient while doing his routine activities, reading, driving …etc.
The glasses would permit to someone with eye problems to live just like someone without eye problems and this would affect the patient physically since he will not worry about his eye problem anymore and psychologically because the glasses will bring the patient the comfort he needs and make him forget about his handicap in his daily life.
No more doctor visits. The glasses are smart enough to diagnose every patient and this would save him time and money.
20/20 visual acuity at any distance. either far or near, the user will get 20/20 visual acuity. No need to switch glasses anymore.
