Coming Soon, Super Vision

lil_nohreaga writes "Wired is reporting that several companies are developing electronically controlled lenses to provide enhanced vision. From the article: Thanks to technologies created for astronomical telescopes and spy satellites, aberrometers can map a person's eye with extreme accuracy. Lasers bounce off the back of the eyeball, and structures in the eye scatter the resulting beam of light."

Comments

A crutch?

[op12]

Would your eyes (or brain) adapt to that making your vision much worse when you're not wearing these "enhanced" glasses? (In much the same way as increasing eyeglass prescriptions cause your eyesight to deteriorate further and increase your prescription again.)

I suppose it's only a matter of time before they make it so the thing is in your eye all the time (in contacts or implant form - I wonder if it could emit a red light to those looking at you? :)

Re:A crutch?

[op12]

From here:

"Usually, eye doctors will prescribe distance glasses for correcting blurred distance vision. Unfortunately, distance glasses actually make nearsightedness worse and irreversible. This is because they force the focusing muscles to stay locked up. This in turn forces the eyes to further elongate, resulting in the need for stronger distance glasses as time goes by. The child is thus doomed to a lifetime of total reliance on distance glasses to see distant objects clearly and progressively worsening nearsightedness. Distance glasses are a false friend.

There is an alternative - reading glasses. If a child starts wearing reading glasses for prolonged periods of reading and other close work at the first sign of any difficulty with distance vision, the focusing muscles will relax and cannot lock up. Reading glasses relax the eyes. There should be no further elongation of the eye. Distant objects can be seen without the need for any glasses. It is important to note that the child will not be reliant on reading glasses. They are simply a protective tool that should be used during long periods of close work. If strong enough reading glasses are used, nearsightedness should be prevented."

Re:A crutch?

[vodkamattvt]

The parent is definately correct. This is cutting edge .. many doctors still refuse to acknowledge this. If you ask your eye doctor about it and he/she dismisses it, go and get another eye doctor that at least tries to keep up with modern science.

Original parents assertion that no one he knows eyes have gotten worse .. all of my friends (in their 20s, as well as my sister) have had their eyes deteriorate terribly and seen their diagnosis go from -1 down to -7 or more. This does not occur if you need reading glasses, or if you have a stigmatism. This is for myopia (nearsightedness).

My eyes had started to blur after years of computer work and reading and I went to get contacts. I use reading glasses as well (although Im only at -.5) to prevent more vision loss. My sister had her vision down to -7 at age 21. She was just told to get reading glasses for close work to prevent more vision loss. So the good news is that the medical establishment is finally catching on (albeit slowly probably because the worse your eyes get the more $$ they get).

Re:A crutch?

[John Whitley]

The parent is definately correct. This is cutting edge .. many doctors still refuse to acknowledge this.

There are times that any profession, physicians included, undergoes the throes of a Khunian revolution. Consider the recent Nobel awarded to the great researchers responsible for correctly characterizing peptic ulcers as a bacterial infection. They had to fight the established dogma that ulcers were stress-related and thereby mystic and incurable.

Both the old myths of ulcers and the new urban legend of eyeglasses causing poor eyesight lacked one big thing: rigorous scientific proof. Are there *any* well-conducted, statistically valid, peer-reviewed studies that show (e.g.) that glasses worsen myopia? That reading glasses prevent or reverse the progress of myopia in children? This keeps coming up as an urban legend, and if there's no science backing it, doctors are right to "refuse to acknowledge it" -- because it's a load of bollocks!

Some people lack vision

[nickname225]

FTA "Nobody has begged us to let them see a road sign two miles earlier." This kind of limited thinking is so rampant that this guy actually uttered this comment without any hesitation. The successful companies create products that enhance people's lives BEFORE they are begged. They create new technologies and then find applications.

Will these glasses impair your 'normal' vision?

[digitaldc]

Software reads the scattered beam and creates a map of the patient's eye, including tiny abnormalities such as bumps, growths and valleys. The pixelated eyeglass lens is then tuned to refract light in a way that corrects for those high-level aberrations.

This sounds like a great idea, my only concern is what happens to your vision when you take off the glasses?
Will your vision be impaired when they are off due to the effect that the correction glasses have while they are on?
Will they cause headaches? Hallucinations?

Re:Will these glasses impair your 'normal' vision?

[Inverted Intellect]

This sounds like a great idea, my only concern is what happens to your vision when you take off the glasses?
Will your vision be impaired when they are off due to the effect that the correction glasses have while they are on?
Will they cause headaches? Hallucinations?

I dont know about impaired vision (my vision has been degrating slightly, but steadily, in the decade since I first got my glasses, but I have no real knowledge of whether corrective lenses can or do have that effect), but I already get headaches when I take my glasses off.

Hallucinations, though? Not unless they actually coat those things with some hallucinogenic chemical or another. I wouldnt worry about it if I were you.

Re:Other applications

[MindStalker]

If these lenses can change optics on the fly, wouldn't it be possible with some extra controll mechanisms to be able to optically zoom as well, that would really rock.

I'll Believe it When I See it

[eno2001]

Reading the article, I find it very "pie in the sky". It stands to reason that if we have the ability to produce this sort of technology, then we're really behind in so many other areas by comparison. If we can make "pixelated lenses", then why don't we have car windows that automatically darken when sunlight gets too bright? If we can determine the abberations of a person's eye in such a small form factor, then why can't a car tell when the driver is squinting and only darken the glass where the light source that is causing the squinting is coming through? If all of this stuff can be done in such a small form factor, then why don't we have a market for "winter helmets" in cold regions that users can wear to warm their faces with heated air, play digital music via a bluetooth link from the music player in their pockets, provide a heads up display with newsticker, external temperature and wind speed, and the current track playing, and track eye movements for interacting with the music player, cellphone or PDA? That sounds technically feasible and would appeal to lots of people in areas where it gets cold in the Winter. Even more to the point, why do we have windsheild wipers when it would be possible to create a grid around a windsheild that blows hot dry air or possibly a laser grid to just melt snow and ice on contact? To me, all the applications I just came up with are in the same league with what this guy proposes. And I think his idea is much more far fetched than my own.

Re:I'll Believe it When I See it

[THEbwana]

A friend of mine knew a guy up in DRC (while it was still known as Zaire) who had a Lamborghini with dimmable windows (using liquid crystal technology).
Waaay cool. Unfortunately, he only had about 400 meters of tar road to use it on.
Now thats frustrating. .. although maybe not quite as frustrating as it should be to all the europeans who funded his way-cool car... or would this kind of "investment" qualify as an exercise in "Capacity building" ?

Lasers on both ends...

[Rigor Morty]

Specifically, I wanted to bring up an unrelated topic...so mod me offtopic now. I recall some years ago a presentation by a researcher where they had made a hologram of a lens, corrected by some program to delete the flaws in the glass of the original optics. It was perfectly flat, and had a decent magnification power. To that end, I wonder; is this technology the final result of that one? And, if it is, why aren't they using the converse (making better lenses out of holograms) to make optically corrected contact lenses, and replacement corneas?

I'm just wondering...

Will they ever be wearable?

[Obvius]

I can imagine some serious eyestrain coming about if your eye has different ideas to the 'smart lens' about what is supposed to be in focus. The fovea (small area of retina that receives the focussed image) is pretty small. You try to focus on a roadsign 400metres away - the super lenses think you're looking at a tree 500metres away. Hellish biofeedback loop ensues. It's giving me a headache just to think about it...

Soon? i'll believe it when i SEE it

[AustinTSmith]

Is this another scientific application that will take years to produce before the rest of us can afford it? probably. Much less have some level of style where we weren't embarrased to wear them in public? I think so.

Ok, so I am a little skeptical... the computers and sensors they plan to attach to the glasses will be cumbersome, and the piece about "dynamic adjustments" sounds a little far fetched. And where do the batteries go??

You might as well add a zoom and x-ray vision to the product suite.

I think better applications that weren't mentioned would be for when good vision is required for safety or a cool factor - snowboard/ski goggles, commercial airline/helicopter pilots, bus drivers, police, military (mentioned), professional atheletes, etc......

Re:Lasers? Evolved Sharks Very Interested

[meringuoid]

Seriously though, this is cool stuff. But also, seriously, it'll go wrong.

I tell you what, the computer running these things better be secure...

* puts together a cunning means to pwnz them, and a nifty blue and white logo with a scrolling quote from Catcher in the Rye *

Now, if you'll excuse me I have a pharmaceuticals giant to bully.

There are grades too.

[skids]

The technology is still improving so I always tell my friends they might want to hold off on "getting etched" unless they just can't stand the contacts anymore. Might as well get the best possible correction.

What makes me wonder about this article is that although the PR makes it sound like these lenses move around while you're wearing them, I see nothing that actually says that. The other company doing "optimized" optics seems to just grind a lense based on scans. So does that mean you have to hold your eyes steady? If so I think I'll wait until they get something that dynamically tracks the eye before I get what would be for me a cosmetic product.

For that matter, maybe I'll wait until they have a switch-on binocular/microscope mode built in too.

Re:There are grades too.

[rossifer]

i just did freelance consulting work with an influential investment banker here in NY. He's in his 50s, and he had the procedure done 6-7 years ago by Tiger Woods' doctor (for those unaware, Tiger Woods had his vision enhanced to 20/15 or 20/10 in order to give himself a golfing advantage). All of which to say is that he can't see now.

But Tiger Woods can still see very, very well without any further correction. So what's the difference between them?

The difference is that your friend didn't take his doctor's advice, and was a poor candidate for laser correction because his vision was not stable and was in the process of degrading. So the surgery corrected his vision at that moment and his eyes continued to change.

Wealthy people seem to be more prone to these kinds of errors in judgement and an "investment banker in NY" would seem to qualify him with brass knobs.

My eyes have been stable since I was 18. Left eye great (20/15), right eye not so great (20/80 w/ astigmatism). Turns out I'm a very good candidate for long-term improvement from laser surgery. I'm now in the process of saving up money for correcting the single eye.

Regards,
Ross

Re:Other applications

[MindStalker]

Simple blink codes could work, but I'd hate to be driving and accidently blink a code..

In the US Army's sniper school

[blueZ3]

they teach you a bit about the mechanics of shooting (zeroing the rifle, holding steady, leading a moving target, estimating bullet drop, etc.) but a lot of what you learn is how to gauge distance and wind. There are a number of ways to gauge each (in the desert, the wind affects the "heat shimmers" you see in the air; in open field terrain, grass etc. moves in the breeze). This is the most difficult part of shooting well at extreme distances, because across long distances the wind may differ between the shooter and target.

The Army's standard-issue sniper rifles aren't the .50 caliber jobs you need for really long-range shooting, anyway. The classes were intense and very interesting in an abstract fashion. Fortunately, I was never called on to put any of this knowledge to practical applciation.

And as the parent says, close combat in cities (MOUT--Military Operations in Urban Terrain) moots most extreme long distance shooting. There's just too much maneuver for a sniper to be effective from a fixed postion with a long view.

Re:Other applications

[Ironsides]

Nah, just having something else that we control specifically. Such as you open your eyes wide to have them zoom in, and squint to zoom out (or vice versa). It only works when you hold them past a certain threshold for a bit, so blinking won't activate it.