By JOsué Karim. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P] .
Using eye-tracking technology to automatically control focus, Stanford University engineers created a prototype of "autofocal" lenses for people who would normally need progressive lenses.
Presbyopia, the gradual age-related loss of the ability to focus on near objects, is a vision defect that affects most people over the age of 45.
For some people, reading glasses are enough to overcome this difficulty, but for many people the only solution, short of surgery, is to wear progressive lenses.
So the engineers at Stanford are testing a pair of smart glasses that can automatically focus on whatever the eyes are looking at.
More than a billion people have presbyopia, and we've created a pair of autofocal lenses that could someday correct their vision much more effectively than traditional glasses," said Stanford electrical engineer Gordon Wetzstein.
For now, the prototype looks like a virtual reality glasses, but the engineering team hopes to optimize later versions.
Autofocus lenses can prevent accidents
Wetzstein's prototype glasses, called autofocal, are intended to solve the main problem with traditional progressive lenses, which require the wearer to move his or her head to focus properly.
Likewise, with progressive lenses there is little or no peripheral focus, making it impractical to drive a car and have to look at the side mirror to change lanes.
Progressive lenses can also make it difficult to navigate the world: "People who wear progressive lenses have an increased risk of falling and injuring themselves," said Robert Konrad, co-author of a paper describing autofocal lenses, published June 28 in the journal Science Advances.
So ?this technology could impact the lives of billions of people in a significant way that most technological devices never will,? he said.
How do they work?
The Stanford prototype works much like the human eye, with fluid-filled lenses that thicken and thin as the field of view changes.
It also includes eye-tracking sensors that triangulate where a person is looking and determine the precise distance to the object of interest.
Although the team did not invent these lenses or eye trackers, they developed the software system that leverages the eye-tracking data to keep the liquid-filled lenses in constant, perfect focus.
Nitish Padmanaban, a graduate student and first author of the paper, said other teams had previously tried to apply autofocus lenses to presbyopia, but without the guidance of eye-tracking hardware and system software, those efforts were no better than using traditional progressive lenses.
The next step will be to reduce the size of the technology, and while Wetzstein believes it may take a few years to develop glasses that are lightweight, energy efficient and stylish, he is convinced that autofocals are the future of vision correction.
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