‘World’s first’ autofocus glasses could spell the end of reading specs
‘World’s first’ autofocus glasses could spell the end of reading specs
While tech ginats have been pushing VR headsets and smartglasses, IXI has been quietly crafting high-tech specs for more practical purposes.
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Neat idea. They have to solve all-day battery life and reliability with no detectable heat before they make sense as a product, though. Given the need to constantly run sensing I will believe it when I see it. But I do want to see it. And the item they aim to replace is already incredibly expensive, so there's some runway here.
Even manual focus would be nice tho. Like when you tap the side of it, it activates the sensing and adjusts
or like just have it be mechanical, please
any sort of electronics in glasses sounds miserable to me
You can't possibly do what they're doing mechanically, so that's off the table. The question is whether you can solve the electronics issues correctly. I don't mind putting my glasses on a wireless charger overnight, but I am sure not going to stop what I'm doing in the middle of the day to recharge my eyeballs.
If they can do it automatically I'm not sure why you'd want that. When would you have a need to get your glasses to focus on something your eyes are not?
Because of the reasons described in the comment i responded to...
When I want to focus past something that is obscuring my view.
But the feature as described is not that it focuses on what's in front of you, it's that it looks at your eyes and focuses to match what they're doing. Presumably if you're looking at something past you they'd focus on the far field, same as your eyes.
I mean, it's a lot to put on the quality of detection there, but if it works it should work like you expect without having to manually rack focus on your eyeballs.
Except my point was actually that ANY automated system WILL occasionally produce an error, or focus on the wrong thing in this case. And that was a specific response to your specific comment, not a critique of any attempt at automating parts of a system that will be an extension of my body. In my experience, it's better for my parts to favor reliablity over perfection in design anyway.
That is... just not true.
I mean, any automated system can spit out an error, but it erroring out once in a million times can be trivial if it's refreshing the tracking multiple times per second. There are plenty of automated systems that work reliably. Or reliably enough that having a button you push to manually adjust the thing is itself way slower than waiting for the device to sort itself out.
Either way we don't know until they have a prototype people can test. It could go either way. But to be clear, it could go EITHER way. It could very well just be more reliable than a manual override. That's definitely a possibility.