Maybe quite soon, eyeglasses will have tiny batteries, microchips and assorted electronics to turn reading power on when you need it and off when you don’t. Traditionally, people who hit their 40s often need extra optical help as farsightedness sets in. They may buy bifocals or no-line progressive lenses. But such glasses have a drawback: the lenses that magnify fine print also blur objects more than an arm’s length away when a wearer looks down, distorting the view when on a staircase, for example, or when swinging at a golf ball. New electronic spectacles, made by PixelOptics and called emPower, are intended to handle that problem with an unusual insert in the bottom part of the lenses: liquid crystals, cousins to the familiar ones in television displays. The crystals change how the lenses refract or bend light, just as varying levels of thickness do in traditional glasses. Only one downside: You have to charge them overnight.Monday, February 14, 2011
New Glasses
Maybe quite soon, eyeglasses will have tiny batteries, microchips and assorted electronics to turn reading power on when you need it and off when you don’t. Traditionally, people who hit their 40s often need extra optical help as farsightedness sets in. They may buy bifocals or no-line progressive lenses. But such glasses have a drawback: the lenses that magnify fine print also blur objects more than an arm’s length away when a wearer looks down, distorting the view when on a staircase, for example, or when swinging at a golf ball. New electronic spectacles, made by PixelOptics and called emPower, are intended to handle that problem with an unusual insert in the bottom part of the lenses: liquid crystals, cousins to the familiar ones in television displays. The crystals change how the lenses refract or bend light, just as varying levels of thickness do in traditional glasses. Only one downside: You have to charge them overnight.
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How do the liquid cristals know that I am going down the stairs and not reading? What will happen, if I go down a stair while reading?
ReplyDeleteThese liquid crystals make possible a lot of information flashes, appearing as short messages on the eye-glass-screen. For me it would be helpful to be informed about the name of my respective vis-à-vis. Preferably every 2 or 3 minutes as memorization. Ideally in different colours (green = friend, red = client). I would set individual limits of chat-durations in my outlook contact file that is connected to the eyeglasses via an additional module producing a slow darkening of the screen at the end of the favoured contact-time. I would install a red button as well. That would produce an outstanding emergency call: “Kiss me!”
ReplyDeleteAnd what a beautiful and reasonable charger! Imagine, that device enables the overnight loading of the content of books as large as the bible or the novelties from NYT (broadcasted by a german blogger) in order to be appeared later on the eyeglass-screen while having your petit dejeuner or chatting (in sign language) with your wife.
ReplyDeleteI would love to have all my books filed in a hard disc somewhere and to access the internet with such eye-glasses in order to surf or to access my library.
ReplyDeleteMaybe "File-on-demand" (or "Access-on-demand") as an analogy to "Print-on-demand" can be one of the solutions of the problem which Mrs Merkel has raised with reference to the Google Book Settlement.
But who knows which developments will occure in the next future. Piergiorgio Odifreddi affirms even, that now can be put into being even a true democratic republic of councils (unce upon a time called soviets), because now we have the tecnology which can make that possible.