How many peirs of glasses do you own? If you need vision correction, you may have accumulated a few. There is your everyday couple, a handful of cheap readers, the old couple you just keep around in case of … and the next you need when your prescription changes.
Start -up IXI wants to bring this number down to one. The Finland-based company, with seed financing from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, develops glasses that added to your vision on the go, potentially eliminating the need to replace lentils or look through half of a bifocal.
“Somehow the glasses you wear are more than 100 years old at the moment,” says Niko Eiden, IXI founder and CEO. “There is absolutely no modern technology in them so far.” IXI’s inauguration product, IXIS adaptive glasses, software and optics for autofocus lenses.
The company has conducted research and development on the concept of the sale of its 2021 debut and is now in the product prototype phase. We recently have calls with Amazon Science, Eiden showed a building of an IIXI couple that wasn’t remarkable as glasses go – it’s by design.
“The experience we love for anyone else like any pair of eye clothing,” he says.
From mixed reality to the real world
Eiden and Hans Co founding City Mity, Chief Algorithm Officic, have worked for the past several years at Virtual and Augmented Reality -Tech for larger companies in the field. Even Asy had worked with advanced headsets and sensing, they saw an option in the specifications, so many people don to everyday tasks.
IXI
“The team has a Comelling vision – forgive the word game – to promote the latest technique in corrective glasses in a way that moves calculation to the background and does it really surrounding,” said Amazon Alexa Fund Director Paul Bernard when he advertised the funding.
As part of the F&U phase, the IXI interview interviews potential users to understand the customer’s needs and what features that would be the most, Eiden says. Eiden is a pilot himself, and he wanted a way to ensure constant good vision while changing views outside the aircraft to instruments on the dashboard and ceiling. The desirability of the quick shift focus without multifocals-something that will be known to any driver who has struggled to switch between looking at the road and the Dashboard NAV system confirmed in the interviews. A mechanic mentioned to turn bifocals upside down to work under a car.
After shown that the combination of adjustable lenses and eye tracks could work and wow solve a problem, the team began to insert on prototypes. “Now we dive into the hardware problems: How do we produce this effectively so we don’t want materials and it lasts long enough? What about power requirements? How much property should we put the components in?” Eiden explains. “It’s an interesting day because the question and the problem are changing continuously.”
Robustness requirements for real life use, such as different lighting conditions and temperature impacts, were impressive, Eiden says of the research process. Measurement of visual quality also became very difficult, he adds: “The experienced visual quality that is different from the person, and even more compared to our laboratory measurements made with instruments or cameras.
IXI
IXI’s technology combines a liquid crystal -based lens with eye tracking. Eye tracking is used to understand the distances of what the user is looking at while fluid crystal technology changes the optical power of the glasses on the go. A typical way to track eye movement would be to set cameras that catch pictures of the eyes and send them to a computer vision algorithm that finds out where the student is located. It’s not possible for a pair of glasses.
“Just the pure clean of data that we should process makes it impossible,” says Eiden. “So we had to find a whole new way to perform the eye tracking that works without cameras, fits into the frames and uses next to no power.” Eiden notes that their propies read by calibration of each pair of IXI glasses for the user’s eyes, which can be done with IXI’s mobile app.
The prototype pair, which he showed, were still returned on external hardware to wirelessly process the signals, making it much faster to iter new versions. Behind him, engineers used a control plate that looked like a sound mixer to find the right “tune” for each specific lens – a process that will later be fully automated at the factory.
“Of race, we have to miniaturize this,” he says, showing a driver’s component who changes the optical power of the lens with software. Everything about IXI, from the Lens Driver Components to the batteries, must be small to fit the frames of the glasses.
A product whose time has come?
Eiden says the wristwatch industry combined with the boom in portable fitness trackers has paved the way for IXI. “There is a lot of optimization needed from a power perspective,” he says. “Five years ago, this type of product would not have been possible because these components just didn’t exist yet.”
Still, the size and form factor of the glasses require specialized components. “We have had to build our own production equipment. We use very sophisticated lasering processes for the manufacturing part,” he says.
Once the team has ironed a successful prototype and manufacturing process, IIX starts on factory buildings of IXI adaptive eye clothing. Eiden says the company is targeting a launch at the end of next year.
The promise of the technology goes beyond the convenience of being able to say, trenching your multifocals, notes Eiden. In the end, you may have a prescription that takes into account the fact that your eyes get tired later in the day.
The whole model of how we think of glasses and prescriptions is due to a change, Eiden says, “If it’s not us, it’s gooir to be someone else. It just makes so much sense.”