These ‘autofocus’ glasses can soon make bifocals outdated – by following your eyes in real time
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- French Startup IXi is working on glasses with autofocus lenses
- Built -in sensors follow eye movements
- Liquid crystal horses adjust the focus to match what you are looking at
Timing to see a plate, tilting your head to look at someone, to gaze at your nose to read a menu: for millions of wisdom people, glasses are a constant compromise. But a new kind of smart glasses wants to clean up things with the help of autofocus lenses.
Finnish startup IXi Is a company that develops frames with adaptive optics. The glasses uses small sensors to keep track of what you look at and then liquid crystal viz to adjust your vision. So you can go from checking your phone to watching a game in an instant.
What is more, nobody should see any difference. The purpose of IXi is to make them look and feel normal glasses, just like your normal glasses, with electronics that is small enough to fit into the frames. So although they may not allow you not to completely throw your specifications away, Autofocus -glasses do not have to wear large headset either.
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When it comes to foresight, the standard fix is currently bifocals. These lenses are divided into two zones: one for distant objects, the other for almost detail. When a user wants to read something up close, he must look through the last. It is a solution with a learning curve and a solution with unnatural cups and limited viewing angles.
Progressive lenses offer a bit of a refinement, so that the transition between close and far is made, but they still have focal sweet spots. Fundamentally, you can’t look anywhere in the framework at everything you want. That is the problem that IXi intends to solve.
The core of the design is a powerful combination: eye-tracking sensors and a rapidly changing lens system. The sensors check eye movements and fires harmless light pulses to measure the distance between you and what you look at. This data is then traced back to liquid crystals, which can quickly change their curvature to give a perfect focus.
According to IXi, the lenses adapt in just 0.2 seconds. The human eye focuses within around 0.4 seconds, which should mean that there is no perceptible delay in looking and seeing. This applies in particular to older users: our eyes become slower to concentrate as we get older, because the natural lenses of the eye become less flexible. This is called Presbyopia and it is the same condition that causes daytime.
This kind of optical technology has been spoken earlier, but mainly in a research environment. IXi is one of the first laboratories that tries to miniaturize the concept in a product for daily clothing. It helps that the startup has obtained around $ 36 million (around £ 27 million / au $ 56 million) to speed up development.
That said, IXi is not the only company that works on autofocus glasses. Laclarée and Elcyo are rival companies that develop similar solutions. None of the three has brought a commercial solution to the market, which may be indicative of the obstacles that remain before the frames on public faces countries.
Optica on prescription quality is subject to strict medical regulations, which means that the autofocus lenses have to pass. There is also a matter of sustainability when it comes to moving parts. Other factors are how batteries can be absorbed to provide the glasses with power, while the frames are kept light and comfortable.
Yet the promise is compelling: a single, adaptive pair of glasses that can replace reading specifications, distance lenses and bifocals. It is a step in the direction of truly intelligent glasses. If IXi can do it, the days of Steuren can stand behind us.
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