Cheap technology for making optic lenses that could help 2.5B people and NASA

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-a-simple-israeli-invention-could-help-2-5-billion-people-and-nasa-1.10452996

by webmaven • 4 years ago

199 58 4 years ago

haaretz.com

walterbell3• 4 years ago

Impressive improvements on prior work, https://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/materials-library/mater...

These glasses contain lenses which can be self-adjusted by the wearer to their prescription, and were developed as a low-cost and accessible eye care solution for people in developing nations. The lens consists of two membranes, in between which silicon oil can be pumped with the syringes on the side of the frames. As fluid is pumped in or out, the focal length of the lens is changed, meaning the lens can be tuned to the specific requirements of the eye. The syringes can then be removed. The inventor of these glasses was nominated for a 2011 European Invention Award.

Affordable freeform optics is especially exciting:

These optical components are neither convex nor concave, but instead are shaped as topographic surfaces, with light hitting the surface in different areas to achieve the desired result. Such parts can be found in multi-focal glasses, pilot helmets, advanced projector systems, virtual and augmented reality systems, and elsewhere.

kps• 4 years ago

As fluid is pumped in or out, the focal length of the lens is changed, meaning the lens can be tuned to the specific requirements

If that could be fast enough, then combined with eye tracking we could have full-field glasses for presbyopia.

toast0• 4 years ago

I'd guess pumping is too slow. Maybe the mechanism used for liquid lenses in mobile phones (and other applications) could work in a larger lens.

Eye tracking and range finding would still be tricky to do in a small space. But something similar-ish was prototyped in 2017 [1]. Not the best source there, but maybe you can find something better with "liquid lens eyeglasses" or use that source to help find the original research.

Also, not sure if liquid lenses will work for astygmatism very well.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/these-smart-glasse...

sarpeedo• 4 years ago

These are called accommodating intraocular lenses. This is a fairly active area of research with huge potential but current technology is very limited.

As a side note who needs eye tracking when your own retina does that for you. The goal with these IOLs is for their lens power to shift based on contraction of the ciliary muscle (the same way a healthy youthful lens works).

I am certainly curious about the potential impact of this UV curable lens technology on cataract surgery and possibility of new types of IOLs.

peterbmarks• 4 years ago

But how is the curve of the lens controlled? Is it some sort of surface tension guided by the edge height of the enclosing ring?

ryandamm• 4 years ago

It’s a combination of surface tension and buoyancy; the resulting minimum energy surface can be designed to whatever freeform shape you want by controlling the liquid density and the geometry of the frame.

ggm3• 4 years ago

thickness of the membrane, but this will cause fresnel lenses if annular, and complexity if a continuous curve, and also introduce (spherical?) aberration of its own due to non-linear effects on light through a varying sized medium before hitting the "lens" part inside the membrane

this is me thinking in terms of "what things about an inflatable structure change how spherical it becomes, when inflated" and adding in "what does it do to optics"

not an optician, a physicist or an inflatable toy clown.

civilized2• 4 years ago

Now, if only we had a cheap way to make perfect paraboloids for giant cheap Newtonian telescopes!

tejtm• 4 years ago

"sweat equity" is as cheap as you are willing to work

... after reading the article, spherical lenses are great in many many applications, there is still a place for aspheric optics one of which is large aperture telescopes you can reach without an orchard ladder or drone.

the sibling comment on spinning fluids does lead the question; can the researchers vary the density of their neutral fluid (or polymer) to gradually vary the "local" forces shaping the lens

dsr_• 4 years ago

Like, say, spinning a dense liquid in a container against gravity?

jerome-jh2• 4 years ago

Sounds like you could cure the polymer while the container is spinning...

The original idea (polymer lenses) is definitely a huge potential for amateur astronomes making large refracting telescopes.

At the end of the article they mention being able to make large mirrors with liquid metal using the same technique as for the lenses. I do not quite understand how this is supposed to work.

avidiax• 4 years ago

We sort-of do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-mirror_telescope

civilized2• 4 years ago

Extremely cool but apparently less useful than one might hope.

hsuduebc2• 4 years ago

Fascinsting. What kind of material they use for lens? The one which reacts to uv light.

onionisafruit• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/yzcli

ridgeguy• 4 years ago

What is the UV-cured polymer? I read a paper [1] by Bercovici, didn't see it identified.

[1]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354978270_Fabricati...

incompatible• 4 years ago

UV curable liquid optical polymer that you can buy on Amazon ... maybe something like https://www.amazon.com/Upgraded-Ultraviolet-Decoration-Trans...

vbezhenar2• 4 years ago

https://static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn:cambridge.org:id...

In this work, we demonstrate curing of PDMS (Sylgard 184, Dow, MI), and UV adhesive (NOA61, NOA63, NOA81, Norland, NJ) lenses. The PDMS lenses are cured by incubating them at 80 C for 1.5 hr, at 60 C for 4 hr, or at room temperature for 24 hr. The UV adhesive is cured by exposure to light at 365 nm (a 36 W consumer grade nail lamp) for 2-5 min, depending on the thickness of the lens and the specific adhesive chosen. Since both PDMS and Norland adhesives are immiscible in water and have densities between ~1.03 (PDMS) g/mL and ~1.12 g/mL (Norland), the water\glycerol-based immersion liquid allowed us to precisely control the density difference. Since preparation of PDMS involves intense mixing of the base resin with a cross-linker, we degassed the PDMS mixture for 20 minutes before injecting it into the bounding surface, in order to eliminate any bubbles trapped in the fluid due to the mixing.

tomrod• 4 years ago

This sounds almost too good to be true -- could be a game changer for a lot of people!

Animats• 4 years ago

There's been a practical solution to this problem for years - standard round lenses. Spectacles have three parameters - spherical radius, cylindrical radius, and axis. For round lenses, axis is set by mounting in the frame. There's a notching tool which notches the lens so it's retained in the frame at a fixed angle. So you only need a set of a few hundred standard plastic lenses, which fits in a small suitcase.

This was developed in India decades ago, but I can't find those kits online. Obsolete?

treeman792• 4 years ago

I got so frustrated with eye glasses that never had the correct prescription that I purchased an optometrist kit off Amazon for $200 I had spent over 10,000 at various eye doctors.

Helped me figure out what was going on. ( unstable prescription)

JuettnerDistrib• 4 years ago

Same for me, except my prescription is stable. The first doctor I went to got it wrong, and every doctor since was too hesitant to change it. One even got it right, but said nothing had changed... They missed that the axis was significantly different, and that had been the problem all along.

Satam• 4 years ago

Hacking your eyes - only on Hacker News. You're giving me ideas to the same.

jtwaleson• 4 years ago

This is enough for the basics, but modern lenses are more complex. Eg multifocals for basically anyone over 45, or high end custom lenses that can correct higher order aberrations.

Anyway, the optometrist lenses kits are still there, you can order them from aliexpress.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

I'm much more excited for the AR/VR usages for this kind of lens tech.

thayne• 4 years ago

Although making a simple pair of glasses costs just a few dollars, in large parts of the world, cheap glasses are neither made nor sold.

And yet prescription glasses cost two orders of magnitude more than that.

walterbell3• 4 years ago

You can buy glasses from online sites owned by the world's largest lens manufacturer who sells the identical lenses to B&M stores. Requires some work to find the right fit between frame and face, but this can be learned. Online price includes one free lens remake, if adjustments are needed.

steelbrain• 4 years ago

You can buy glasses from online sites owned by the world's largest lens manufacturer who sells the identical lenses to B&M stores

Link please!

mapt2• 4 years ago

They don't outside of the US.

A good portion of my eyeglasses (custom prescription, with astigmatism correction) have been <$10 drop shipped to the US from Hong Kong, frames and lenses included. The most expensive variations (Transition sunglasses, complicated plastics to be thinner, memory metal frames) were $70, frames and lenses included. Most pairs end up in the $20-$40 range shipped.

All this $150-$600 nonsense in the US just pays for the retail space, the branding, the insurance bureaucracy, and rent-seeking by the Luxxotica cartel.

The downside is that I don't get to try them on beforehand... but nothing so far has been totally unwearable, and buying six pairs for $200, as I did once, addresses that concern pretty well.

supernova87a• 4 years ago

Wasn't there, like a decade ago, some university researcher (MIT?) who came up with the idea for a portable lens forming machine that could make arbitrary lens shapes on demand in the field? Maybe it involved rapid curing plastic or something, and a mold that could be shaped easily.

I remember it being described as great for rural areas where it was unlikely / difficult to ensure you would be able to make a return visit or get the people needing glasses to come back when the lenses were eventually ready.

mapt2• 4 years ago

2014 adjustable liquid lenses: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3933712/

Describes both a dial-based and a less mature fluid-based technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9FpEWQkg-w

Dial-based: https://www.designboom.com/technology/eyejusters-self-adjust...

DialVision review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge3H0FtGUw8

ChuckMcM• 4 years ago

Reminds me of this story: https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-why-a...

Basically it is possible to make much more affordable glasses but people like Luxxotica keep it from happening because it cuts into their margins.

That said, making complex lenses this way would make building things like microscope pretty straightforward. There is a lot of optical equipment that needs lenses that this technique could satisfy.

olalonde• 4 years ago

The article doesn't explain how they've been able to keep the "affordable glass" competition out of the market though. Natural monopolies are quite rare. My intuition is that this is not a free market and there is some degree of regulatory capture. I'm guessing not just anyone can set up shop and start manufacturing/selling cheap prescription glasses? Can you import them easily?

vbezhenar2• 4 years ago

In poor countries regulations are often much more lax. Especially when it comes to harmless things like glasses.

sct202• 4 years ago

In the US at least, EssilorLuxottica owns a large portion of the eye glass shops (Target Optical, Lenscrafters, etc) and eyeMed insurance. VSP another eye insurance company has a similar set up where they own their own glasses maker.

There's nothing really stopping anyone from buying from discount eye glass companies online, but you have to guess at which frames you'll like based on pictures and reviews instead of instore.

derefr• 4 years ago

As far as frames go, Luxxotica exists because of regular old market-consolidation forces (i.e. it owns so many brands that it makes deals with optical stores to be their only supplier of frames.) Same reason you'll see restaurants that only sell soft drinks made by PepsiCo.

But the real interesting puzzle is why there are so few lens manufacturers.

If you Google the names of these (Zeiss, Leica, Olympus, Corning, etc.), you'll likely quickly figure out that 1. there's about one major optical glass producer per country; and 2. all the ones you'll ever hear about in an Western prescription-glass context are headquartered in countries that are key NATO players; and in fact often in the capitols of those countries.

What's up with that?

"Optical glass", besides being in prescription glasses and smartphone cameras, is the key bottleneck in the resolving power of military imaging satellites.

Each one of these companies is an example of the opposite of "regulatory capture" — these companies exist at the behest of the state, as pseudo-nationalized entities. They're essentially defense contractors that happen to make civilian products on the side.

Competitors to these companies aren't allowed to spring up, because any such a competitor would essentially be a mercenary arms-dealer for IMINT materiel assets.

With exactly one high-quality optical-glass company per country, each under said state's thumb, states can easily track where everything (of sufficient resolving power) that that optical-glass company makes, goes.

It's basically the same reason that there's only a few companies in the world making highly-precise gyroscopes (that could be used for missile guidance); or making industrial-grade cycling centrifuges (that could be used for uranium enrichment.) States will not permit these to be manufactured "out of sight."

choeger• 4 years ago

Can someone explain me how this works? The article mentions a "rigid frame". Does that frame need to have the (inverse) shape of the lense? Is the method thus just a way to copy lenses or can it make a truly new (i.e. more precise than all necessary tools) one?

mordae• 4 years ago

Polymer forms a bubble in the petri dish. Add more material to make the bubble curvature more pronounced or less to flatten it.

The other side is flat.

mlatu• 4 years ago

holy crap...

maybe it is possible to create microstructures using a phase array ultrasound emitter?

2dvisio• 4 years ago

Got a pair of these from prof Silver himself. https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_silver_adjustable_liquid_fi... At first glance it would seem the same concept. How is it different (if) ?

torginus• 4 years ago

I wonder if this tech could be used to make adjustable VR lenses.

heeen2• 4 years ago

Lenses are already quite cheap to make. You can get prescription glasses fitted to a knockoff designer frame of your choice in half an hour for less than $50 in e.g. Shanghais knock off malls. You don't even have to bring your prescription, they use a laser device to measure the glasses you brought with you.

bartvk• 4 years ago

I’ve done this in Beijing. I asked for sunglasses and they gave me the lenses and the frame separately, then at the back of the building, some person dipped the lenses in a dark liquid and after drying, put them in the frame for me. Amazing.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

Even in Finland you can get basic standard prescription glasses for 59€, or even second sunglass pair for same price(not polarizing though). And the measurements are free too...

Though these are standard material lenses and price really goes up when you want thinner and lighter for higher refraction.

Still, just how cheap something standardised can be even in country with high labor cost is amazing.

mateo1• 4 years ago

Interesting, but how in the world is this cheaper than injection molding?

Cheap technology for making optic lenses that could help 2.5B people and NASA

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