The Real Smart Glasses
These days smartwatches and smart glasses look more like smart phones with the shape of watches and glasses. They are innovations of course, but they can not be compared with the jump from a phone to a smart phone in my opinion.
Today I started thinking about what kind of smart glasses I would call a reinvention. Glasses are much older than phones and even older than watches but the glasses we wear daily haven’t changed much since it was invented. That’s special and even a bit strange if you compare it with other technologies.
Maybe they haven’t changed for so long that people forget they are not perfect. Take presbyopia for example. Presbyopia is caused by hardening of the lens, and our eyes cannot adjust as easily as before. Reading glasses only solve the problem by shifting the focus point so that the eyes can see things close. It does not solve the underlying problem. Therefore the vision of people with presbyopia is still not as good as young people.
Do we have the tech now to make reading glasses to restore the perfect sight? I guess we are close if we were not already there yet. I can image sensors mounted on the frame of glasses detect the tension of ciliary muscles, which control the shape of the lens. With this information we will know whether we want to focus closer or further. The sensors pass this information to a super fast dedicated chip in the frame. Then the chip translates this information into an electrical signal to change the refractive index of the material of the glasses, which compensate for the lost ability to change the shape of the lens. Yes, this is the direction I’d like to see smart glasses heading to.
PS:
Harry Truman once said the only thing new in the world is the history you do not know. It turns out this also applies to science and tech world. Today when I read about VR technologies I found this article: VR optics could help old folks keep the world in focus:
These prototype “autofocals” from Stanford researchers use depth sensing and gaze tracking to bring the world into focus when someone lacks the ability to do it on their own.
…if the user was looking at the table or the rest of the room, the glasses will assume whatever normal correction the person requires to see — perhaps none. But if they change their gaze to focus on the paper, the glasses immediately adjust the lenses (perhaps independently per eye) to bring that object into focus in a way that doesn’t strain the person’s eyes.
…The whole process of checking the gaze, depth of the selected object and adjustment of the lenses takes a total of about 150 milliseconds. That’s long enough that the user might notice it happens, but the whole process of redirecting and refocusing one’s gaze takes perhaps three or four times that long — so the changes in the device will be complete by the time the user’s eyes would normally be at rest again.
Another interesting piece about VR I read today is a slides from Stanford.