[T]he days of popping reading glasses on and off or constantly shifting your gaze through bifocals may be numbered. Researchers at the University of Utah have developed "smart glasses" with liquid lenses that can automatically adjust their focus.
"The major advantage of these smart eyeglasses is that once a person puts them on, the objects in front of the person always show clear, no matter at what distance the object is," says Carlos Mastrangelo, the electrical and computer engineering professor who led the research along with doctoral student Nazmul Hasan.
[...] The new smart glasses consist of lenses made of glycerin, a thick clear liquid, enclosed in flexible membranes. The membranes can be mechanically moved back and forth, changing the curvature of the glycerin lens. The lenses are set in frames containing a distance meter on the bridge, which measures the distance from the wearer's face to nearby objects using infrared light. The meter then sends a signal to adjust the curve of the lens. This adjustment can happen quickly, letting the user focus from one object to another in 14 milliseconds.
The glasses come with a smartphone app, which uses data about the wearer's eyeglass prescription to automatically calibrate the lenses via Bluetooth. When the wearer gets a new prescription, they can simply update the information on the app.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by charon on Sunday February 12 2017, @03:03AM
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday February 13 2017, @12:53AM
Measure the nerve pulses that control the eye's lens. That should give reliable information about what distance the eye tries to focus on.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Wednesday February 15 2017, @05:23PM
Exactly. And the eye tracking tech is simple, too. There were analog cameras from decades ago that focused on where your eye were pointing.