Spectacles With a Grand Vision

A trip to the eye doctor is annoying and sometimes vaguely ridiculous (please cover your eye with this spatula and recite your alphabet until your head hurts). But for those in countries where such services are inaccessible or expensive, the need for affordable vision care is no laughing matter.

Now a quirky new device is making it possible for the developing world’s "four eyes" to change their prescriptions themselves with the turn of a little dial, according to SciDevNet. Never again will anyone have to stare at backwards Es or strain to decipher between tiny Ks and Xs. Instead they can just spin the wheel on their glasses, and their “variable lenses” — called Focusspec — will adjust until things snap into focus.

Dutch industrial designer Frederik Van Asbeck developed the glasses, basing his design on a 1964 discovery by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, who found that focus can be changed by combining and then shifting two lenses that are convex on one side and concave on the other.

Anyone else wondering why it took 45 years for this discovery to spark a practical invention? Apparently other lenses have been designed using these principles, but Focusspec is the first such lens to be mass-produced. The reason is because the technology to produce lenses with a high degree of precision (glasses can cause a headache if adjusted even the slightest bit wrong) has only been around for a few years.

The lenses will allow for adjustments between +0.5 to +4.5 dioptre or -1 to -5 dioptre and cannot be used for astigmatism. While the majority of people fall between -6 and +6, the glasses should still work for up to 90 percent of adults.

The first batch of 30,000 pairs will go out to Afghanistan, Ghana and Tanzania by the end of October.

Photo courtesy of ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser, via Flickr