Open Knowledge - Water based eyeglasses: no optician required
Jan. 3rd, 2009
08:16 pm - Water based eyeglasses: no optician required
British inventor Josh Silver, a former professor of physics at Oxford University, has come up with a game-changer of a product design with his water-lensed glasses.
Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.
The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.
You can mass-produce millions of these, rather than manufacturing myriad individual lenses each tuned to a user’s specific vision deficiencies. And while the one-size-fits-all mentality may not fly in developed nations, Silver’s goal is to help the hundreds of millions of people in developing countries who suffer from poor eyesight.
Via core77
Original: craschworks - comments


WHOA. Ok, my brain hurts now.
I don't understand your question regarding near/far, though, since that is what the lenses correct for in the first place.
I could use some of those... being poor and needing glasses and all.
Cheap glasses for children who break/scratch/damage their glasses all the time.
Cheap glasses for a second/backup pair, for those blind without their glasses.
Loaner glasses for temporary vision conditions (if there are any that would require glasses) and/or for accident victims and the like who are suddenly without their glasses.
Cheap glasses for people on some flavor of public assistance or otherwise too poor to get regular glasses.
Depending on how easy it would be to make them adjustable more or less on the fly, variable glasses for people who need reading and far-distance glasses and don't like bifocals.
But I think there'd, at least, need to be some way to correct for astigmatism for them to be too terribly useful for people who have alternatives besides these and stumbling around nearly blind.