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Cheap Fast Eyeglasses from a Desktop Fabricator
purduephotog writes "Doctoral candidate Saul Griffith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and inventor of the Lego powered chocolate printer was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing a device that molds eyeglasses rapidly and cheaply. Best of all, he's motivated for the good of humanity."
I'm sure he'll be overjoyed when he graduates, finds himself unemployed and realizes just how much money he could have made and helped the world by patenting his invention and licensing it out.
Hmm, a device that can automatically figure out your prescription, and another that can make cheap eyeglasses?
I see these popping up all over the place, like the "check your blood pressure here" devices.
If it means that more people who can't afford vision correction can get glasses, whether in a poor country or not, I'm all for it.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
I could have sworn one optometrist i went to a few years ago had a machine that automatcially brought an image into focus for me. Way cooler than this stone-age notion of looking at the eye chart as the "doctor" flips lenses. Which one is clearer, one or two. Why do we keep doing this stone age crap?
I'm all for automatic vision testing, I feel like my current prescription was issued by a talentless hack.
Automatically testing vision and cranking out lenses is sweet. Next they just need to fire on an AR coating and everyone is good to go.
This sounded like even cooler tech to me. I like the idea of something that takes away the subjectivness of the traditional exam for a prescription. He could even throw a glaucoma tester into the goggles.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I'm interested in the uses of this machine behind eyeglasses. I've been working on several projects where we are creating instrumentation, and have been surprised to find that optics are both difficult to find in specific diameters and focal lengths, and rather expensive when you do find the optics you need.
While not a big deal to major corporations who don't balk at shelling out $20 a lens for custom work, for academic projects and independant research, that is a significant chunk of the cost of our prototype, considering the ease and realtive low cost involved in obtaining a microcontroller these days.
I imagine that, since he can make eye glasses, producing DCX, PCX, DCV, and PCV lenses would be easy too. I'd love to see this kind of machine available at academic institutions for producing parts for research.
glasses and eyesight used to be one of those really crazy scientific endeavours. how many of use have had huge, unwieldy glasses when we were younger, and trips to the optometrist were like going to some strange laboratory? things like this are fantastic, simplifying the field and making it more accessible to all. i heard about another system developed that can diagnose stimatism by analyzing the red-eye in a photograph. these kinds of scientific endeavours inspire others!
Yeah... who could have seen a Google cache link posted by the editors coming? Not me!
But seriously this guy made two wonderfull inventions. They now collect "old" glasses to send to third world but this is a logistics nightmare.
Imagine a simple jeep outfitted with these inventions doing the rounds in poor areas. Put the tester on and voila few minutes later a pair of glasses. 1 day per village. Couple of jeeps. Shouldn't take long at all (after all it is not like glasses need to replaced that often, even in the west once a year is good enough even for still growing kids).
As far as I know it ain't the material that is costly in glasses but the whole distribution process. Plenty of bargain chains around that can offer really really cheap glasses due to scale and not offering specialist lenses. This looks even cheaper for hard to reach areas.
Brilliant.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In more upbeat stores frames are closer to designer clothing. You pay because the costs of designing a new model is only spread over a few models. Ford Focus costs less then say the latest ferrari and that ain't just the cost of manufacturing.
But yes for those in need a single frame design in a couple of sizes (for different size heads) is not that expensive. Just ask any army that used to issue soldiers with glasses. Or for that matter look at the cost of sunglasses.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Or, instead of reading speculative fiction, maybe you could read "The Story of My Experiments With the Truth" by M.K. Gandhi to find out exactly what would happen if more people in the world were motivated by altruism rather than the almighty dollar.
There's the fashion angle, but the frame makers also have a product that people truly need. What am I going to do, not wear glasses? I don't have a choice; I couldn't read the text box I'm typing in without them. It's a seller's market.
I don't need or want the very latest style, but I do want a pair of glasses that fits, provides a decent field of corrected vision, flatters my face, *and* is comfortable and durable. This runs me a couple hundred bucks, but glasses are something I wear all day every day and enable me to function...my myopia is such that I would qualify as blind if it were not correctable. The prices on non-designer frames are not unreasonable, given how seldom people replace them and how vital they are.
Think about it this way...if you had to put something directly over your eyes without which you couldn't carry out the most basic day-to-day activities, wouldn't you want it to to be high-quality and reasonably attractive?
I don't know if my reasoning applies to people with better vision, who can get by without glasses for most things but still need to wear them for driving and such, but I've never felt cheated by the cost of my frames (and they came with nifty magnetic sunglass lenses--stylin' and oh-so-practical).
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
Yeah, all the eye tests I've had in the last few years have started with the machine. I'm told that some places just use the machine, but I've never seen one and I wouldn't go to one.
I go to the eye doctor to have my eyes checked. This is more than just get the correct glasses. The doctor needs to look in my eye and make sure that all the pieces are still in place.
I've heard of several different problems that need to be checked for once in a while. They all have complex medical names that I haven't a hope of spelling. See your eye doctor regularly and make sure that if you get one of them, it is corrected early.
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a good fiction book on the effects of a society where people have their own personal matter reconstruction equipment. Those with the cheap units are subjected to lives full of cheap commodity throwaway (but completley recyclable!) things, while those with more money for the better equipment can have better, higher quality things. And those able to afford real hand-made objects seem to hold themselves above all that.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
The experiences of folks I know who wear glasses (I don't) has been that the lenses are not the biggest cost, it is the frames.
They must not have ghod-awful prescriptions like mine then. The lenses are still the most costly part of my eyeglass purchases.
That having been said, I have to ask the same question: Why do frames cost so much? I see non-prescription sunglasses at convenience stores -- with frames not too different from what I'd want for daily-wear glasses -- that cost less than US$20. But just try to find frames for prescription eyeglasses for under US$150. After spending upwards of $US200. for lenses, I'm not pleased about having to spend almost that much for frames so I can actually use the lenses.
It can't just be the designer names either: Designer (non-prescription) sunglasses are cheap; why can't prescription frames be priced the same?
My guess is it's because it's a captive market. If you can't wear contacts and don't want surgery, you're stuck paying their exorbitant costs. I wonder if the growing popularity of eye surgery for vision correction will drive down costs, but I'm not holding my breath.
Please don't make me imagine that. My boy already has way too many toys as it is without being able to print more. Every floor in the house is covered with little bits and pieces or puzzles, blocks, etc.
What I'd rather have is a Mr. Fusion on my desktop where I can drop whatever annoying electronic toy of the week he's playing with and recover some of the energy that went into making it.
//
I have wondered if it were possible to make a program that could help determine the shape of the corrective lens needed for a vision defect.
Since with high resolution monitors and 256 (or more)levels of gray available, it should be possible to create an 'eye chart' that looks bleary and out-of-focus to a normally-sighted person but sharp and clearly-focused to someone with deformed vision.
I imagine a program where the user can adjust the software implementations (precise changes on the screen regards to the blurring of the chart characters that mimic the effect of an individual lens) of the various corrective lens stages of an eye exam. When the user is seeing clear and focused characters on the eye chart, the program would know from the distortions of the normal chart needed to create this clarity exactly what the eyeware prescription would need to be for this individual user.
The user could send the eyeglass perscription to a off-shore eyeware maker and get perscription glasses made at a tiny fraction of inflated American prices. Or order the glasses made by the method developed by the subject of this article.
If you read about the history of eyeglasses, you'll learn that back in the middle ages, when what we, today, call "proper" eyeglasses (not just a simple magnifier, but a lens that corrects for nearsightedness or farsightedness) - were invented, in Venice Italy, their fabrication was a carefully guarded trade secret. Corrective eyeglasses were for the extremely wealthy only. Among the extremely wealthy, of course, were the keepers of this secret.
Think about the millions of people who were functionally blind, and could not afford glasses due to this trade secret.
And now - due to openness of the technique, and this new technology, optical health insurance (and the incredibly obnoxious markups on lenses and frames that came with it) may no longer be necessary. Let's hope so.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
No pun intended.
I have keratoconus (basically a deformity in the cornea) and some days I can see fine and some days things are a little blury. The only solutions are either rigid contact lenses (ick) or cornea replacement surgery (double ick). Glasses aren't much of a solution for me because my eyes shift so much that a prescription would maybe last a month or two at most.
Maybe with this device I could cheaply fab lenses that would work for me until my eyes morph again. And then all I'd need to do is fab another pair.
I have trouble with passwords among other things.
I've worked with the stuff you're talking about on one project. You're right, it's somewhat delicate. But you're assuming that it's impossible for the process to be improved. In the early 1900s, the motor oil in cars had to be changed every few hundred miles. Nobody said "This car thing will never work because the oil sucks". No, they hit the lab and developed better oil.
My guess is that they'll develop a 2 stage process. The first stage will be like what we have now. Then some sort of baking or chemical treatment will harden it.
-B
Saul, here is an idea for you.
:)
Why glasses?
Why not straight to the root of the problem?
How about a low-cost, self-administered laser eye-surgeon machine?
Or maybe even further, some iris muscle(?) adjuster nanosomething?
Or further down the road, a gene screening and adjusting nanosomething for pregnant women, so that perfect sight corrections would be achieved at the fetus state?
Okay, that may cause Suppressed fetus memory syndrome, and all the legal craps that follows, right?
How about egg or sperm penetration pre-treatment?
Possibly combined with some afrozediac...
Ah... I just love that my mind can go high without any chems
Ok, call me an ogre, but do glasses really have to
be custom made? I don't believe so. My vision
was measured around 4.00 diopters which was
something like 20/300. Anyway my siblings and parents
all had vision which varied between 3 and 5 and because
I used to constantly break my glasses and could get by
amazingly well with their glasses. I know it wasn't perfect,
but I would wear them for months at a time.
I honestly think you could do more good for less money
by mass producing lenses in common diopters settings and
just letting the buyer pick his own, like pants or shirt
size. If the buyer wants to pay extra money to get 20/20
vision instead of 20/40 then let him.
Look at something like prescription lenses for sporting
equipment. Often that stuff is only sold in 0.5 diopter
increments (i.e. 1.0-1.5-2.0-2.5...etc)