What are electronic glasses for visually impaired people? How are they good? You will find answers to these and other questions in the article. Wearing glasses is the traditional way to correct vision. However, today they have significantly changed in connection with the development of technology.
So, glasses with adjustable diopters are the latest development. That is, now a person can instantly adjust the magnitude of the optical power of the lens. These devices are called adaptive glasses, and they are a universal tool for correcting the visual acuity of any person. Consider some versions of electronic glasses.
Solution of problems
Few today know about the existence of electronic glasses. People with poor eyesight often face various problems. One of them is when the eyes of a person see differently. To correct this defect, you have to order glasses with different diopters, but it comes out much more expensive and is not always possible.
Another problem is the discomfort associated with the visibility of objects at one or another distance. For example, in glasses for healing myopia, objects placed far away are clearly visible, but they are too powerful for reading. With farsightedness, everything happens the other way around.
And finally, the last situation is a deterioration in vision, requiring the replacement of lenses with stronger ones. All of the above problems can be solved by multifunction glasses with adjustable focus, the system of which is a very simple mechanism. It is based on the principle of binoculars.
Features
What are the qualities of adaptive glasses? The most important feature is the presence of a pair of curved lenses in contact with each other. A small wheel is attached to each edge to adjust the optical power, which allows you to adjust the picture for the eyes separately.
If you turn the wheel, the lens will shift. This action will change the diopter from -6 to +3. As a result, people with hyperopia and myopia can use adaptive glasses. There are other versions of adaptive glasses, in which the focus is transformed using an electric pulse. These are amazing emPower glasses.
Appearance
The world's first electronic glasses promise to put an end to traditional optical lenses. They will not need to be supplemented by others or changed, as these devices automatically adapt to your vision.
On the new emPower glasses, the lenses are coated with a very thin scattering of liquid crystals, which, depending on the tasks, sets the clarity automatically. This model looks like simple glasses, but in reality it is a completely revolutionary device. So, people with poor eyesight will no longer need to change reading glasses to simple glasses - just adjust emPower, which are equipped with the world's first electronically focused lenses.
Customization
Is it difficult to set up glasses with LCD lenses? No, not difficult. Debugging is very simple here. The “read” mode can be activated in two ways:
- Lower your head down.
- Touch the arms with your fingers.
It is known that emPower glasses are manufactured by PixelOptics. Her leadership claims that in the future they will produce glasses for people with different visions. On the market there will be versions of a wide variety of styles, shapes, colors and parameters, each person will choose something for himself.
Control
Electronic glasses operate on battery power. It takes approximately 8 hours to fully charge it. After the battery will last about three days. You can charge it while relaxing.
The control mode can be selected in the temples of the glasses: manual or automatic.
Nuances
It is known that the world's first emPower electronic glasses were proposed by PixelOptics in 2011. For these progressive lenses, the optical region for near vision has a certain constant amount of add-on, to which, if necessary, another +0.75 D can be added.
Addation instantly increases automatically either when you tilt your head (we wrote about this above), or you can manually turn on the electronic area (by touching the side of the ear).
To increase the size of the addition, an invisible layer of liquid crystals is used, which is placed in the lens. When a weak electric current flows through this layer, its refractive index increases.
Using the electronic additive +0.75 D, one can significantly reduce the parameters of the addition of the most advanced lens (the difference between the optical power of the near field of vision and the far field of view) required by a person. And the less the add-on, the less peripheral distortion the avant-garde lens has, and the greater the field of clear vision at all distances. That is why in emPower a person will feel much more comfortable than in simple advanced glasses.
By the way, further modernization of emPower lenses is likely to lead to the fact that a person with the help of an electronic additive will be able to get the required add-on completely (maximum value of 3.5 D). Also, the area of the LCD zone will be expanded to the entire lens.
EmPower lenses are made from a polymer with a refractive index of 1.67. This suggests that they will be light and thin even with significant diopters.
Implementation
The emPower glasses are already successfully sold in the USA. In Europe, Novacel is engaged in their distribution and manufacture. EmPower lenses come with a classic-style charger and frames. The only thing that does not allow you to fully rejoice is the price of wonderful devices. After all, emPower glasses cost from $ 1,000 to $ 1,200.
By the way, PixelOptics has been creating emPower for over 12 years. Over this period of time, she has registered in the United States 275 patents related to this technology.
Smart glasses
Oxford University has developed glasses that can help patients with low vision to navigate the terrain and avoid obstacles.
The lead developer of these marvelous devices is Dr. Stephen Hicks. A video camera and a tiny computer processing unit are mounted on the rim of the glasses. There is software that allows you to get a picture of objects and submit it to the eyepieces. Instead of lenses, electronic transparent displays are installed that display pictures of objects and people near the user. As a result, a person can distinguish chairs from tables, borders from shadows and people from each other.
The developers say that their smart glasses do not replace lost vision, and therefore are not suitable for blind people. Instead, technology increases the level of one's own spatial erudition. In fact, displays provide more complete information about what a person sees, but this data allows the user to achieve greater confidence in what is happening around him.
Also, these glasses work great at dusk and can help those who suffer from night blindness. Today they are still somewhat massive. A little later, manufacturers plan to lighten and reduce the body and set the market price at the level of a simple smartphone.