IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses
engadget.com114 points by amichail 3 days ago
114 points by amichail 3 days ago
Looks super cool!
> It still needs to obtain the necessary medical certifications in order to sell its glasses and get all the production pieces in place
Oh, ok. I hope they have enough funding to last till the FDA clears them, in 2030 :/
The same organization which allows any snake oil to be marketed as long as they say it’s a “supplement” will hold a pair of glasses up for years, as though there could be a hidden danger to a lens that can change to a second prescription.
There is potential danger with a lens that can suddenly change to a second prescription. For example: imagine you're driving and your whole field of vision suddenly starts flickering in and out of focus. That would be incredibly distracting and pretty dangerous. Even if they just started focusing on 1 foot away it'd be quite bad.
These glasses address farsightedness, which doesn't apply while driving. Worst case you just take them off.
Plenty of us are simultaneously far and near sighted. I can't drive without glasses, but until I got progressive lenses I couldn't use my phone with my glasses on.
If they are replacing bifocals, the wearer needs both a near- and far-sighted prescription. Far-sighted only would never need these.
Either failure mode would be dangerous while driving because you need to be able to read your dash.
You should look into dietary supplement regulations, specifically about label claims and advertising.
You mean the rule that’s basically “Anything goes” as long as you reproduce the magic incantation in tiny print at the end:
“This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”
The FDA doesn’t “allow” snake-oil supplements. They have no authority over supplements.
They in fact do have a lot of requirements for supplements and their labeling, but do not require (in fact forbid) any claims that the supplements should be used to treat or cure any disease.
https://www.fda.gov/food/dietary-supplements-guidance-docume...
I am not so sure about the eye tracking and autofocus stuff, but would love a simple focus knob on the frames to adjust instead of changing to a different pair of glasses. I suspect the tracking and focusing electronics must be somewhat clumsy and a battery life of a single day sounds suboptimal for me.
This exists. There was a frame with a slider on the nose bridge which refocuses circular lenses. I read about it a long (decade+?) time ago.
Add to that the blinking LEDs that track eye movements. No thanks.
Are you one of the few people who are able to perceive infrared light?
No. My wife has migraines, though, triggered by flashing lights. I’d have to wonder about the long term affects from the glasses.
I'm under 40, recently had cataract surgery to address mild cararacts, and deeply regret that choice. I strongly feel I lost more than I gained, and now need to carry multiple pairs of glasses every time I go out to engage many common activities.
Unfortunately I don't have presbyopia at all (my surgery still left me myopic) and my inability to change focus distance is drastically more severe than what happens naturally with aging. This first generation of IXI glasses won't be useful to me.
But I really, really want something like it.
You can swap out your default lenses with multifocal lenses... I use multifocal contact lenses, and my wife and my mother both had the surgery. My wife got the panoptix (no need for glasses at all) and my mother got vivity (just need reading glasses). At night, there are halos with the panoptix lenses (same with the multifocal contact lenses), the severity is not always the same per-person, and it bothers some people more than others (interferes with night driving), but it's an option. Yes, it's another surgery, but depending on your ability to afford it, and the amount it bothers you, it is still an option. From my point of view (admittedly, with contact lenses), going from three different pairs of glasses (vision, vision+reading, plain contact lenses+reading) to contact lenses with no glasses at all was just unquestionably worth it.
I'm unfortunately not a candidate for multifocal intraocular lenses due to other problems with my eyes, otherwise I would have gone with them for the first surgery.
Multifocal contacts are probably not a good long-term fit for those same reasons, and there's the same problem with progressive lenses in glasses. Old-school bifocals are okay, but limited in the usual way.
Perhaps you could try monovision in glasses instead of multifocal?
I have monovision contacts and they work pretty well for me, though mid-tier (e.g. desk computer) work requires special glasses.
Have you tried using contact lenses to make one eye long focus and one eye short focus ("monovision" in intraopticlens terms)? Then you'd only need at most one middle-distance pair of glasses on hand.
Exactly what I do, and even though my short focus is set extra short, I only need the middle distance glasses for desk computer work.
Do you mind telling what procedure you got? I know multiple people that had lens replacement surgery for cataracts and are very happy with their vision. But that is just a couple of stories.
Just had my natural lenses removed and a standard monofocal lens put in in each eye. But I've had only a marginal improvement in visual acuity and none in color vision. Before my surgery my cataracts weren't even detectable in my normal field of view; they were tiny and my brain just patched around them. But my overall acuity was low enough that I met the insurance criteria and I went for it thinking it would be similar to the experiences of others in my life who had received intraocular lenses. But those people were all older or had ICLs or experienced more impairment from their cataracts than I had. I made the wrong call getting the surgery. :(
I don't have cataracts, but my prescription is so severe and I'm getting to an age where there's an RX difference between near, medium, and far sight, and I just wanted to commiserate. It is annoying to have to have multiple pairs of glasses, and remember where you put them, and do you have the right ones for this, etc.
I keep my new computer glasses at the computer, and the old ones downstairs for "other" uses. Then I keep my new driving glasses in the car, and the old ones downstairs for "other" uses (tv, etc). Basically, I keep the new ones where it matters and accept that my vision will be mediocre in other cases. And also, I'll see 2 of everything because I have double-vision (corrected with the glasses - but "older" ones don't work very well for it).
I have to choose each year between paying for (main) glasses or contacts, so I usually opt for contacts and that means my glasses are a few years old. When I wear them at night, I definitely see double. Hate it.
I'm a -20, so small differences really magnify.
It's only me or it does not explain how it works?
> the technology [...] can be separated into two parts. First [...]
is the part that tracks eye movements and what they are focusing on.
The second part is never written. There is a hint later on:
> [the] prototype lenses, made up of layers of liquid crystal and a transparent ITO (indium tin oxide) conductive layer. This combination is still incredibly thin, and it was amazing to watch the layers switch almost instantly into a prescription lens
"Cameraless eye tracking" is understating the key insight here. They don't even need to track which direction you're looking! The only thing they need to measure is the difference between the two directions, and parallax tells them how to focus.
Important to note, of course, that this only works for people with normal binocular vision -- but that's the majority of customers.
Does this mean a single pair can be adjusted over time to adapt to a changing prescription?
Buying lenses is often the most expensive part, especially for those with astigmatism, second only to the frames themselves, which is another racket altogether.
Putting two adaptive dynamic systems next to each other is tricky. Your eyes and these glasses could easily create a positive or negative feedback loop or begin oscillating. So while cool I hope they have some experienced controls people on staff to detect and prevent such things.
That's the beauty of eye tracking. The two adjustments are orthogonal. You don't cross and uncross your eyes to adjust focus.
If only they’d had a frontend web dev on the team!
Maybe they really should. That way, instead of having a run of the mill unusable parallax scrolling landing page, they could have a page with a controllable animation that visually explains the mechanism of action behind these glasses. Would be a hell of a lot more interesting than vague or otherwise inscrutable prose about liquid crystals / their products / their company being cool.
Don't say that, I don't want lenses running on Vue/React.
Make it love2d where humans and building are replaced by pixel art.
In the last two to three years, I've hit a point where I need to take off my glasses (near-sighted, can't see things far away) to read my phone. I can still make out the text with them on, but it's physically uncomfortable and holding it at a distance helps.
I've been thinking about the existence of bifocals and how they aren't ideal as I come to terms with the inconvenience of removing my glasses and putting them back on repeatedly as I task switch. This sounds pretty great and I hope it's not smoke and mirrors (given enough time, science fiction tends to become reality, so I'm hopeful).
I was reluctant to try progressive lenses at first as well. Ended up loving them. Look ahead to see far, look down to see the car dashboard or your phone.
Of course, being a programmer I have another pair of glasses just for monitors. If your work doesn't involve reading a lot maybe you can get away with just progressives, but this is HN so not likely.
I'm at the same point you are, and a couple years ago I ended up getting bifocals, and let me tell you it's absolutely worth it! I ended up getting "multi-tasking bifocals" (what my glasses place called them), which are basically normal glasses with the lower area a second prescription for reading the phone. There are others that have 3 areas (reading at the bottom, distance a small spot in the middle, and then a middle ground elsewhere).
I didn't really want to get bifocals because it's what old people wear ;-). But it's so much better with them.
The glasses place (CostCo Optical) guy was kind of a jerk about it, all but saying "you're going to wreck your car if you use these for anything but at your desk", but I just "yeah, yeah"ed him, I like my prescription dialed back a bit from max power for day-to-day use.
If you can afford it, maybe give them a try? Zenni and other onlines might make them affordable enough to just try?
Honestly, even if they could shift focus via some sort of "command" - a muscle tick or something - that would be a game changer as it is. Every time I play D&D, I have to keep taking off and putting on my glasses so I can read my notes, and see my players' faces clearly.
(I'm aware of the multifocal glasses mentioned in the article; they didn't work well for me.)
An alternative to multifocals is glasses with one lens for near and the other for far or to use a contact lens in only one eye in addition to your normal glasses. This also obviously comes with downsides that take some getting used to but some people prefer it.
I'm in a similar situation but found that getting "computer glasses" made which use the near prescription (and are not for long distance) work well for this. (I run D&D as well lol) I could not handle multifocal at all, was disorienting for me.
As a glasses wearer I'm looking forward to this tech. I like the idea of natural, seamless auto focusing, and as a future fantasy, a simple, toggleable overlay of info would be nifty.
Going out foraging and being able to identify plants and fungi by simply resting my vision on something for a pause is the sci Fi tech I actually want
How does it compare to multifocal contact lenses?
My understanding of those is that contact lenses work the same way that multifocal glasses work, with the added disadvantage that every time you blink, it takes them a second to re-align correctly. So this should be completely different, if it works.
I tried them and could not get used to them. I went back to using single focus lenses and using mild readers (1.00 or 1.25 for desktop screen work at arm's length, and slightly stronger readers (2.00 or maybe 2.50) for very close work.
I typically have a pair of mild readers that I leave on the desk and carry a pair of the stronger ones around for reading my phone, restaurant menus, etc.
Note if you wear glasses you can "focus" them to some extent by sliding them up and down your nose.
>> The team has also refined the nose pieces and glasses arms to accommodate different face shapes. Apparently, when testing expanded from Finland to the UK, British faces were "...different." A little harsh when talking to me, a Brit.
So the finish company's eyeglasses didn't fit a "British" face?
Fun story about this problem. When I was a kid I was a nationally-ranked swimmer. Almost everyone who could wore "Swedish" racing goggles aka swedes. These are very simple and tiny goggles, just a plastic cup that fits on, almost within, your eye socket. Your eyebrow normally sits over the top of the goggle, holding it onto your face. (I could swim slowly without the strap.) They are amazing, by far the best racing goggles out there. No foam to peal. Small enough not to fall off during a dive. And held together with string so you can adjust them perfectly to your face. They were also dirt cheap. But without any soft parts they are unforgiving to the point of racism. If your skull is even a slightly different shape than the Nordic/Viking/Swedish ideal, the goggles will not sit on your eye socket properly. On Asian people they tend to leak unless you tighten them painfully. On many black people they tend to rotate and climb into the eye socket. To nobody's surprise, they have kept the "Swedish" name because, in this case, any racial connotation is very appropriate.
https://malmsten.com/en/products/p/swim-goggles/swedish-gogg... https://alltides.com/products/lunettes-de-natation-swedish-b...
(If you buy these, ditch the stock straps. Nobody uses them because they rot/age very quickly. Use silicon string.)
I wonder how long the wait will be for AR glasses to have this option too.