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Matilda Equiluz
The startup Pixieray wants to bring that number down to one. The Finland-based company, with seed funding from Amazon's Alexa Fund, is developing eyeglasses that adjust to your vision on the fly, potentially eliminating the need to swap out lenses or peer through half of a bifocal.
"In some sense, the glasses that you're wearing are more than 100 years old at the moment," says Niko Eiden, Pixieray founder and CEO. "There's absolutely no modern technology in them so far." Pixieray's inaugural product, IXI, combines software and optics for autofocus lenses.
Having shown that the combination of tunable lenses and eye tracking could work and would solve a problem, the team began iterating on prototypes. "Now we are diving into the hardware problems: How do we produce this efficiently so that we don't waste materials and it lasts long enough? What type of power requirements? How much real estate do we have to put the components in?" Eiden explains. "It's an interesting journey, because the question and the problem change continuously."
Pixieray's technology combines a liquid crystal-based lens with eye tracking. Eye tracking is used to understand the distances to whatever the user is looking at, while liquid crystal technology changes the optical power of the glasses on the fly. A typical way to track eye movement would be to set up cameras that capture images of the eyes and send them to a computer vision algorithm that figures out where the pupil is positioned. That's not feasible for a pair of glasses.
"Of course, we need to miniaturize this," he says, showing a driver component that changes the optical power of the lens with software. Everything about the IXI, from the lens driver components to the batteries, needs to be tiny to fit the eyeglass frame.
Eiden says the wristwatch industry, combined with the boom in wearable fitness trackers, has paved the way for the IXI. "There's a lot of optimization needed, from a power perspective," he says. "Five years ago, this type of product wouldn't have been possible, because those components just didn't exist yet."
Still, the size and form factor of the glasses require specialized components. "We've had to build our own manufacturing equipment. We are using very sophisticated lasering processes for the manufacturing part," he says.
The promise of the technology goes beyond the convenience of being able to, say, ditch your multifocals, Eiden notes. Eventually, you might be able to have a prescription that takes into account the fact that your eyes get tired later in the day.
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