- The French startup Ixi works on glasses with automatic objectives
- Integrated sensors Track Movements Eye
- Liquid crystal lenses adjust the focus to correspond to what you look at
Place to see a panel, tilting your head to look at someone, looking at the nose to read a menu: for millions of people in tune, glasses are a constant compromise. But a new type of intelligent glasses aims to clarify things, with the help of automatic development objectives.
The Finnish startup Ixi is a company that develops executives with adaptive optics. Its glasses use tiny sensors to follow what you look at, then liquid crystal lenses to adjust your view in function. So you can go from checking your phone to a game in the blink of an eye.
In addition, no one should see a difference. IXI’s objective is to make them look like and feel like your normal glasses, with tiny fairly tiny electronics to integrate into the frames. Thus, although they do not allow you to drop your specifications, the automatic focus glasses will not force you to wear a large helmet either.
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Regarding myopia, the standard fix is currently a bifocal. These lenses are divided into two zones: one for distant objects, the other for a detail. When a user wants to read something closely, he must travel the latter. It is a solution with a learning curve – and which can involve reached nature head inclinations and limited vision angles.
Progressive lenses offer a little refinement, smoothing the transition between near and far, but they still have Sweet Focals points. Basically, you can’t look anywhere as part of whatever you want. This is the problem that Ixi plans to solve.
At the heart of its design is a powerful twinning: eye tracking sensors and a quick offset lens system. The sensors monitor the eye movements, pulling harmless light pulses to measure the distance between you and what you look at. These data are then reinstalled to liquid crystal lenses, which can quickly change their curvature to give a perfect orientation.
According to IXI, lenses adjust in just 0.2 seconds. The human eye focuses on approximately 0.4 seconds, which should mean that there is no noticeable gap between looking and seeing. This is particularly true for older users: our eyes become slower to concentrate as we age, because the natural lenses of the eye become less flexible. This is called presbyopia and it is the same condition that causes myopia.
This type of optical technology has already talked, but mainly in a research context. IXI is one of the first laboratories that try to miniaturize the concept in a product for daily wear. It is useful that the startup has obtained some $ 36 million (around 27 million pounds sterling / $ 56 million) in funding to accelerate development.
That said, Iixi is not the only company to work on automatic development glasses. Laclarée and Elcyo are rival companies developing similar solutions. None of the three has yet brought a commercial solution to the market, which perhaps indicates the obstacles that remain before executives land on public faces.
Optics of quality of prescription are subject to strict medical regulation, which means that the automatic development objectives must pass the gathering. There is also a question of sustainability whenever they are mobile parts. Other factors include how to incorporate batteries to supply the glasses, while keeping the light and comfortable frames.
However, the promise is convincing: a single pair of adaptive glasses that can replace reading specifications, distance lenses and bifocals. It is a step towards really intelligent glasses. If Ixi can withdraw it, the days of looking at the rims could be behind us.
