Exciting news for those enough who are 40+ and spend too much time in front of a computer screen: a Finnish startup called IXI is promising to end the era of clunky bifocals and the ‘head-tilt’ struggle of progressive lenses, replacing them with a pair of glasses that focus as naturally as the human eye using a combination of infrared eye tracking and liquid crystal-transparent indium tin oxide glasses
Clunky bifocals?
Vs the battery, camera, and focusing mechanism these are going to need?
There is at least graceful degradation:
Plus “clunky” bifocals have way fewer moving parts and can be made with thin wire frames so they’re lighter.
I’m sure there might be someone with really bad eyesight for whom these might be useful - like if the near and far prescriptions are too different to be possible, maybe - but this is inferior to the actual solution in almost every way.
And if you forget to charge your bifocals they still work the next day.
As someone with clunky bifocals, the weight of the frame (even the chunky ones) is absolutely unnoticeable compared to the weight of the lenses. You don’t get thin wireframes for the lower weight, you get it because they’re less noticeable visually.
This Guy bifocals’s
Good to know. But unless you want to be giving Rivers Cuomo the autofocus ones probably aren’t your style.
Also, could there be a backlash against thick frames in the future because they might be hiding electronics
If it works as well as they’re claiming, that would be pretty cool. For the moment I remain skeptical.
Are these the auto-focus ones? If so, that’s surprisingly slim… If there are no other components.