Slashdot Mirror
Adjustable-Focus Glasses Can Replace Bifocals
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that inventor Stephen Kurtin has developed glasses with a mechanically adjustable focus that he believes can free nearly two billion people around the world from bifocals, trifocals and progressive lenses. Kurtin has spent almost 20 years on his quest to create a better pair of spectacles for people who suffer from presbyopia — the condition that affects almost everyone over the age of 40 as they progressively lose the ability to focus on close objects. The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame that makes it possible to focus alternately on the page of a book, a computer screen, or a mountain range in the distance. 'For more than 140 years, adjustable focus has been recognized as the Holy Grail for presbyopes,' says Kurtin. 'It's a blazingly difficult problem.' Each 'lens' is actually a set of two lenses, one flexible and one firm. The flexible lens (near the eye) has a transparent, distensible membrane attached to a clear rigid surface. The pocket between them holds a small quantity of crystal-clear fluid. As you move the slider on the bridge, it pushes the fluid and alters the shape of the flexible lens."
...how do you clean them?
I've had glasses for ages now. I clean them every day. My rigid plastic lenses eventually develop small scratches no matter how careful you are.
So how will these lenses with movin parts hold up when cleaned for every day for N years?
The FAQ claims:
I'm not impressed unless it's been proven over time...
.: Max Romantschuk
I was planning to get bifocals in the near future. I hope this invention goes into production soon.
But the price, the price...
My presbyopia is such that I just do without spectacles for close work, and don monofocals for driving, etc. I have bifocals, but they irritate me to no end. If adaptive focus spectacles are reasonably-priced (no more than double the cost of good coated bifocals), then I'll be first in line.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
There were only two people in the world who ever looked good in round glasses: John Lennon and Mahatma Gandhi.
This poor lady looks like she needs a wedgie.
The technology is very interesting, but you can't get any traction unless people are willing to actually buy and wear the glasses. As geeks, sometimes we overlook the attractiveness aspect of new technology. We shouldn't, it's half the battle.
But the price, the price... My presbyopia is such that I just do without spectacles for close work, and don monofocals for driving, etc. I have bifocals, but they irritate me to no end. If adaptive focus spectacles are reasonably-priced (no more than double the cost of good coated bifocals), then I'll be first in line.
Yeah, it sounds like many people would enjoy this. My question is why if this was granted in 1999 is it not in production today? Is there some FDA-like approval he needs to get? Is he having trouble finding capital? Is he unable to convince people it will work? A fabrication issue? Doesn't make sense to me.
Or (like the article says) does he just have his hands in too many fields of patents to develop one of them into a business model? I was kind of shocked to see that it was issued a decade ago and I've never heard of this until now.
My work here is dung.
The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame that makes it possible to focus alternately on the page of a book, a computer screen, or a mountain range in the distance
Whowever designed this has obviously never worn progressive lenses. In real, ordinary life, you don't "decide" to focus on something for a minute and adjust the slider accordingly, you adjust your focal point *all the time*, unconsciously. What progressive lenses do is allow your neck muscle to "emulate" what your eye muscles would normally do if you weren't an old fart.
I just don't see myself (pun intended) spending the day with a finger on the rim of my glasses to do the same. If I want to be comfortable for an extended period of time in front of the computer, or to drive, I put on my near or far glasses. For the rest of the time (90% of my day), I put on the progressive glasses. Perhaps the adjustable lenses would allow me to have one pair of comfy glasses instead of two, but I ain't giving up my progressives. At any rate, my reading glasses are on the table, and my driving glasses are in the car, so it's not really a problem in the first place.
(On a side note, I've just realized I'm talking about my presbyopia on Slashdot, and the dreaded word "middle-aged" comes to my mind.)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Water-based eyeglasses
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They're three years too late for me; I had a CrystaLens implanted in one eye in 2006. It is an adjustable focus lens that replaces the eye's natural lens, and it uses the eye's focusing muscles to focus.
Its drawbacks are first, you have to have surgery, and second, it's pretty expensive. It's affordable if you have cataracts, where insurance will pay most of the costs and even then the out of pocket expense to cover the difference in price between an old fashioned InterOptical Lens (IOL) and the new one.
Your eye actually has two lenses; the cornea and the crystalline lens. The latter is what focuses, until you reach your forties when it starts becoming stiff, too stiff for the eye's muscle to move.
These new reading glasses would be a boon to anyone with the old fashioned IOL, anyone who is afraid of letting a doctor stick needles in their eyeball, and anyone without about $6,000 to get one eye fixed. I'll bet they're expensive (haven't yet RTFA) but I'm sure they're cheaper than surgery, and like all new technologies, the price will come down in time. In twenty years you'll be able to get them for ten bucks in today's money, I'd be willing to bet.
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If my sub-$100 camera can auto-focus, why can't my classes? Hmm?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I've been wearing glasses for over 35 years since kindergarten, and about two years ago, I got progressive lenses. Sure, they were a bit strange at first, but within a day, I just "got it" and I think they're great! By simply doing "micro adjustments", I can get pretty much anything into focus very quickly.
I really don't see what the big deal is. Can someone please explain why progressive lenses are so despised?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Reading glasses: $2 at Northern Tool. Regular prescription glasses: $40 from internet (china). Total cost: $42.
VS.
Trufocals: $895.
Next topic!
I really, really want adjustable-focus lenses. But I don't want heavy lenses, and I don't want large, round lenses.
I'm hoping these folks, linked in TFA, can deliver. Electronic focus sounds a lot more appealing and reliable.
It would be lovely to track focus based on ciliary tension, but it'll probably be easier to measure vergence and adjust focus correspondingly. We can already do gaze-tracking pretty well, and vergence in principle gives a much large signal with less noise than ciliary muscle tension.
The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame
Good thing the over-40 crowd is well-known for their dexterity and ability to accurately manipulate tiny adjustable sliders.
This issue with this invention is that it requires user interaction to work. Bifocals don't. You just look in a natural way (slightly down for reading and computer screens, straight ahead for distance) and the right adjustment is right there for you. With today's progressives, after a day or two, you don't even realize you have a multifocus lens. Having to adjust the focal distance is a cool idea, but way too much work for something that you do thousands of times a day without thought.
Now pair this up with a computer and a laser range finder to know how far away the object you are looking at is and some miniature mechanicals to have the glasses do the focusing for you and you are talking some serious cool. Who wouldn't want to be seen in a trendy Picard/Borg laser outfit?
This really sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Bifocals and trifocals work, and have no moving parts.
http://blogostuff.blogspot.com/
If you've got Presbyopia, you have a de facto non- or at least very-limited-focusing-ability eye. That should make the job easier.
The hard part is the iris keeps moving around. But still, it would be cool to detect what you are looking at and focus at that distance.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If he's needs some beta testers I want to get on the list. I was prescribed bifocals a year and a half ago, kept them for a couple of months and had to give them up, I just couldn't find the comfort zone with them. So I'm back to single vision glasses, and while I have no problem reading or watching TV (for instance) I can't go back and forth between them. I'd buy this guy a beer if I could try his lenses on for a while.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
Forget the glasses. I've been wearing contact lens since 1985. When I needed bifocals, I just got bifocal contacts.
It's amazing how the eye adjusts to using the correct part of the lens depending on what you're looking at.
You need holographic lenses, they have BOTH lenses (actually a hologram of both lenses) and focus at two distances across the whole lens.
The advantage is when you look close your eye uses one focus plane and when you look far your eye uses the other focus plane. So the switch is instant and without the slider. I have these, damn expane
So if I wore bifocals, I'd just adjust my gaze slightly up or down depending on where I'm looking. I imagine that would become pretty natural after only a very short time using them.
Now with these things, I'd have to constantly reach up to my face and adjust a little lever -- all day, every day.
That seems absurd.
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...cheap enough for everyone yet? Or am I missing something?
If medicine were ever perfected, we'd all be the same.
Just get a bigger monitor.
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Trina Thompson. Sounds lazy, and her parents must have been lazy too, she doesn't even use Katrina.
But I'll believe it when I see it.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Rather than having a manually operated lever, they should add some antannae to the glasses which are mechanically coupled to the focusing mechanism. So, as you get in closer to an object, the antanna on the glasses touch it and brings in the focus automatically.
I thought that the folks at the University of Arizona who had announced (in 2006) a different type of adjustable glasses using an embedded liquid crystal layer and an adjustment varying the electric field applied to it had put their development into fast gear and already were shipping prototypes.
Darn! Past shock, again...
You're only semi-conscious; they drug you into what they call "twilight sleep". They use anesthetic eyedrops to numb the eye and they put an IV in your arm with the "twilight sleep" anesthesia. They tie your arms to the gurney "so you won't try to help the doctor". The only unpleasant part is when the needle actually goes into your eye, but it's not painful, only shocking and wierd. They have some sort of frame over your face that lets them see inside your eye with a microscope (they dose your eye with dialation drops as well as anesthetic) and holds your eyelid open.
You don't see the needle coming towards your eye. I journaled about it; the link is in the comment you responded to. The needle goes through the white of the eye and they shoot ultrasound through it to turn the lens to mush, suck the mush out and insert the prosthetic lens. It sounds bad, but it isn't. The best part is I wore thick glasses all my life, I was severly myopic. The CrytaLens cures myopia (nearsightedness), presbyopia (farsightedness), astigmatism, and cataracts. The eye I have the implant in is now better than 20/20 at all distances, but the surgeon said mine worked out better than most.
Now, a vitrectomy, that's a nightmare. I wouldn't wish one on anybody, but it sure beats the certainty of absolute blindness. BTW, one slashotter asked me to warn people before I link the vitrectomy journal, it really freaked him out. There's a link to the wikipedia article about victrectomy in that journal, and there's a picture in the wikipedia article that is NOT for the faint of heart. Pray you never have a detached retina!
Free Martian Whores!
I wonder if this can be used for the diabetic crowd, who typically end up with constantly changing prescriptions due to their sugar levels.
There is a company called Adaptive Eyecare that came up with this a few years back: Universal Eyeglasses
Admittedly, the TruFocals look a bit cooler, what with not needing syringes taped to the sides of your glasses and all.
I seem to recall that they were!
Somehow I doubt it counts as prior art though.
As glasses these will cost a bomb, and won't be covered by insurance for years.
As a lens slipped inside the glasses, they could be made more cheaply and sold OTC at Walgreens... and almost certainly end up making far more money by selling to a much larger market. And I'm sure they've got the patents locked up so nobody's going to be undercutting them with slip-ons.
You can see an Airplane pilot, adjusting his glasses to better see the control panel, which presumably means the pilot can't see inside and outside the plane at the same time.
Get me a ticket on that Airline!
People get that way because the lenses in their eyes stiffen with age and soon the muscles int he eyes can't adjust them properly. People who have had certain type of cataract surgery where they replace the lens inside of the eye usually regain most all of their focusing ability.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Has everyone forgotten the cautionary tale of Navin R. Johnson?
Steve -- If you have to call it a system, you don't know what it is.
I guess I don't quite understand. Pushing my reading glasses up on my forehead (short term) or sticking them in my shirt pocket when I don't need them seems to work just fine. I don't really like them on my face if I'm not reading something, since I can see just fine beyond 18 inches from my eyes. Is this intended for the folks that already need corrective lenses for existing vision problems?
Yes, the lens stiffens with age. (There was a competing theory that it grows with age, and that focus problems arise because the focus mechanism doesn't have enough range of motion to adapt, but that apparently hasn't been borne out by further studies.
No, in general, lens replacement does NOT give you back focusing ability. There's one type of lens (Crystalens, referenced upthread) that restores accommodation for some recipients, but results vary widely, and regular replacement lenses don't accommodate at all.
Siemens created tiny lenses out of a drop of oil in a water suspension years ago. They work by the same principles, can be controlled with electrical fields, cost next to nothing, and are built into modern camera phones etc. This thing is just an upscaled version with a "lid". So one should be able to use electronic focusing on it too.
But it is not that new as a technology...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I wonder how these will respond when temperatures may vary significantly. Will I need to adjust them going from an air-conditioned office out into a sweltering summer day? Similarly going from a heated house into a Minnesota winter? What about possible freezing? I take my glasses with me when I camp and some nights the temperatures are below freezing both inside and outside of my tent.
I guess I'll watch for this to hit the market, but am simply glad I don't need them yet.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
this enslaves you to the slider, instead of just shifting your head or your eyes to use a progressive lens.
must have an idiot cousin who has a factory to make little wedges that move lenses.
oh, by the way, prior art exists. see any camera lens. no patent forrrr YOU.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I remember many years ago a spot on the Discovery channel about cheap glasses for the village people in Africa, it was two lenses, one flexible with a tube protruding from one of the ear stems where you would pump clear epoxy in between the lenses to the desired focus, the epoxy would set and viola; cheap prescription glasses. These were already in production. TFA's idea is identical sans hardening of said liquid.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
There are real situations requiring instantaneous switching among or maybe even simultaneous use of multiple focus distances. A good example is playing an instrument in a band or orchestra. It's important to be able to see both the conductor (at a distance) and the music (arms length), more or less at the same time. If glasses are focused only at arms length, attempting to see the conductor is pretty uncomfortable. This may be useful for some, but not for me.
This technology has been 'worked on' since 1996, and is targeting people in low- to middle-income families; the goal is to provide them for a cost of $1 by the year 2020 (nice choice!).
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=adjustable-eyeglasses-poor
Yet, the same technology is being offered by this vendor for nearly $900!
Now that's what I call some impressive marketing!
Well not really want to , but I might just vomit anyway. If you are comfortable with tunnel vision maybe progressive lenses are OK, but if you need to look at anything that is large or up close they are beyond awful. I tried them for a whole month and never got used to them , and even if I had adjusted to the point of no nausea or headaches they still would have been useless for anything other than reading business cards.
I have been wanting a pair of these since I first heard about them.
I saw an article once when I was a kid, in Popular Science, or Popular Mechanics, or similar, that talked about something that sounds similar to the device described in the summary. There was a artist rendition. It had a slider on the temple bar that controlled the amount of fluid injected into a cavity between a rigid front lens and a flexible rear piece.
I prefer polarized sunglasses or clip-ons. They cut out the glare a lot better - especially the very annoying and bright "sun reflected off other car windscreens".
Even leaves tend to look greener (since most of the reflections are blocked). Plus it's easier to look through the car windscreens to see other cars ahead.
These, or the optigrab?
The last time I saw his idea, several years ago, he was promoting it as a way to bring glasses to the third world, with instant adjustment and cheap production. I guess, at nearly $900 a pair, he's thrown that idea over the bridge, hasn't he?
growing new eyes has been the Holy Grail of eye care.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Reading glasses: $2 at Northern Tool. Regular prescription glasses: $40 from internet (china). Total cost: $42.
VS.
Trufocals: $895.
Next topic!
Cost of an electrical computer in 1954 : $400,000, not including the power cost for operation, the cost of either a new building to house it or several structural modifications, etc. And then there is highering a couple computers to check the equations going in, technicians to keep it operational, a supply of new tubes as they burn out... Why, you could be spending a million dollars there.. In your first year alone.
Cost of hiring 40 computers to solve any problem that computer can, and far more, and in some cases faster? $165,500. And you didn't even have to pay to power them, food them, house them in any way except the office building you have anyways? And in the end these computers will pay taxes, raise families, and support the economy.
With an argument like that, why would you even want the cost of an electrical computer? Costs more, does not have a long-term savings of labor saved, and just takes away from honest hard-working labors - as said, without saving money- that sounds down-right unpatriotic...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Genitronic_replication/
A lens like this is going to be really useful as an optical element in camera lenses. Instead of having to rotate a barrel to move one or more elements back and forth, the adjustable element can stay in one place and change shape internally. This means quieter and faster focusing, lower power consumption, and quite possibly a larger focusing range. Since almost all lenses focus at infinity, this means adding range on the close end.
It also may mean shorter designs are possible than is currently the case, or that wider zoom ranges could be packed into the current barrels. Since I don't hear too many people complaining about the size of lens barrels on point-and-shoots (since they fold up really nicely), it's most likely going to be enhanced capabilities that wins the marketing war. However, this would mean that current capabilities like 4x optical zooms could be fitted into ultra-compact cameras.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I've been myopic with serious astigmatism all my life, and am just getting into presbyopia. I have tried bifocals, and can't wear them for any length of time without serous eye strain - I see fine when using the appropriate sections of the lens, but after a few minutes of normal wear, my eyes start to sting. I've endured this for a week at a time in the hopes I'd adapt - no dice. Maybe a few years from now, when my corneas go completely stiff and my eye muscles give up on bending them, I could do bifocals. Right now, I'd love to try something like this, or clip-on, flip-up bifocals.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Seems like an easy next step...that and getting Dolce and Gabbana for styling and extra bling.
My optrometrist has a machine that shoots lasers into my eye and measures the resulting focus. It gets the first 95% of the prescription right, leaving the last 5% to the optometrist and my taste.
I believe the Lasik people use something similar, also measuring cornea shape.
Astronomers have auto-focus telescopes which work off guide stars or lasers. Many cameras auto-focus.
Some wyou'd somehow minaturize this and put it into eyeglasses. Who knows when?
Anyway, you can pry my progressives from my cold dead fingers. No way would I switch to having to spend the day thumbing my nose. Can you imagine trying to walk down a staircase in these things?
Squirrel!
Water based glasses that are currently vaporware... would that make them steam based eyeglasses that are perpetually fogged up?
As mcgrew points out, the treatment for retinal detachment is such fun.
Surprisingly, having your eyes spot-welded with a laser is the least of it.
The scleral buckling makes your myopia even worse. (Why can't you get
inexpensive glasses with minus lenses similar to the drugstore reading
glasses?) Trying to sleep face down to keep the C3F8 Octafluoropropane in
the correct place is a nightmare. And then, the C3F8 gives you cataracts.
Has anyone tried http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetyl-carnosine
eyedrops as an alternative to surgery for cataracts? So far I
haven't found any reference to risks, side effects or other
downsides, which seems too good to be true.
I 'invented' these suckas many years ago.
I did, however, recognise how unwieldly they would be compared to existing solutions and decided it wasn't worth actually making them.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
If you can cite a case of a 60-year-old without presbyopia, then that would be the greatest medical miracle since parthenogenesis.
These wonderful new glasses have a slider, that you're supposed to tweak until whatever you want to look at comes in focus, every single time you want to focus on something, i.e., all of the time!
How is this superior to varifocals, where all you're required to do, to focus anywhere you like, is to just look at the damn thing? (Yes, it's a bit more complicated than that, but once you've used varifocals for a few days, it becomes completely instictive.)
I' ve been wearing varifocals for a couple of years now, and I heartily recommend them.
Well, that's interesting -- particularly for an older family member who's developing cataracts, and whose Type II diabetes makes conventional cataract surgery unacceptably risky. We should run this by her opthalmologist.
They are conveniently called U-Specs and are currently in the process of being manufactured on a mass produced scale for as cheap as a dollar or two (or not more than a few dollars), i.e. cheap enough to be actually usuable by people who cannot afford custom made prescription glasses.
The principle is very simple as well, based on the work by Nobelprize winner Alvarez: slide two specially shaped lenses over each other (by means of a slider) and achieve any focus in a wide range of a few diopters.