Hi-Tech Bifocals Improved My Eyesight but Made Me Look Like a Dork | Hacker News Reader

Hi-Tech Bifocals Improved My Eyesight but Made Me Look Like a Dork

gizmodo.com

239 pointsamichail105 comments

I’m not sure why they didn’t include a photo of someone actually wearing them, so here’s one for you: https://www.engadget.com/vixion01-glasses-reduce-eyestrain-b...

The battery life and IP rating are a bit disappointing. Having to charge your glasses ~twice a day sounds like a big ask.

As long as the battery is fresh. Li-ion degrades pretty quickly. For most of the product's lifetime it's going to be more than that.

IP rating is IMHO critical. If people start relying on it to live their life, getting it killed by unpredicted rain or an accidental water splash will be quite a shock.

Battery life could be worked around if they're really that much of an improvement in day to day use. Even buying two or three pairs to go through a full day could be a worthy tradeoff if they don't need to pair to anything. Cost could be an issue, but 2 or 3 of them would still be cheaper that many hearing aids for instance.

Very Geordi La Forge esque. Would be nice if this is more stylish and normalized by the time I need bifocals

Good news, you tend to care less about stylish by the time you need bifocals. I have leveled up to the point at which I can wear bifocals and suspenders without giving any fucks. Probably because they no longer alter my probability of getting one.

Agree fully, as I put on the dorkiest headband in the world to capture sweat from my forehead as I work outside. It's not that we older folds don't care what people think, but more like we now realize that people rarely care or think about others who aren't close to them. Those few dozen people that see me in my dorky headband won't even remember my face in 15 seconds.

I looked at a few images, they look like a combination of:

* Geordi's visor

* A nose clip for swimming

* Stick-on googly eyes

The last design choice seems particularly bold. I guess they're less threatening that way? Or it just kind of happened for technical reasons.

Very stylish they are

I don't think "dorky" is the right word for these glasses. Anachronistic is better. And that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on one's perspective.

Others mentioned Geordie, but even going back (and obviously the "visor" was in the zeitgeist since at least the 70s with the android type bots drawn by futurists), my first thought was the Six Flags Great America type sunglasses that were cool as hell when my older sister came home with them.

This is the closest I could find in search without trying too hard.

But yeah, why can't these companies just design regular old glasses styles so people don't feel like a dolt and maybe would want to buy them. Instead everyone has to be made to look like a glasshole and all the entitlement that connotes in the mass mind.

https://di2ponv0v5otw.cloudfront.net/posts/2018/03/20/5ab0dc...

They look like Google glasses because they have the same design constraints: small lens and needing to fit a lot of electronics in the frame. If they could make them look normal I think they obviously would.

They don't look nearly as bad as the title suggests.

Edit: "My eyesight was sharper than usual for both far and close distances (down to two inches)" blimey! I might be sold. I need read glasses for soldering and close work like that and it's a bit of a pain.

> They don't look nearly as bad as the title suggests.

Come on, yeah they do. You don't have a car-style cellular antenna sticking up any more, the way you would in the 90s. But that, and incremental refinement in materials and profile, is really all the aesthetic difference from what you'd see back then. It doesn't do enough to help.

Granted, you're not wrong about the potential benefits, although I think I'd need a lot of convincing that it's enough of a qualitative improvement to be worth the cost and complexity over fixed magnifiers. But I'd never consider these at all if you could see my electronics bench from the street.

> Come on, yeah they do.

Not at all. I actually think they look kind of cool. I still would prefer very understated glasses, but these are way better than a lot of the awful frames you see people wearing sometimes.

Those have at least the virtue of being on trend. It's not that these don't also make a fashion statement; it's that the content of the statement is "I decline to participate."

Not that I'm judging; I'd hardly be one to, certainly not these days when the most elaborate style I bother going for is "artsy graying homosexual" and even that not with any real commitment, aside from the graying part, which isn't up to me. But I was a classic when I was young, and while no one ever particularly mentioned my glasses adding to my looks that I recall, I believe I now know a way I could've had people mentioning they took a lot away from them. Make of it what you find it to be worth.

It looks like he's wearing the same visor as robocop:

https://deathbattle.fandom.com/wiki/RoboCop

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

> They don't look nearly as bad as the title suggests.

There's no accounting for taste, but no. No no no. This is Halloween costume bad. Just came from ComicCon bad. Google glass bad. And people are going to assume they are being recorded.

I think they look pretty cool.

Articles only need click-bait titles, not pictures, in order to be profitable. Relevant and informative pictures are an unecessary expense. People don’t read articles to be informed, people read articles to feel smart. And to just feel smart, you don’t actually need a picture.

It always amazes me eyewear entrants don't start with something tried, tested, and timeless like wayfarers or aviators. More room to work with and shove batteries evenly, too. Sure, offer this as an option for people who like it if you want, but the classics are still popular for a reason.

Damn that’s bad

These look incredible, and a huge improvement over bifocals or similar. Having lenses that automatically adjust to focus at the distance you're looking would be incredible, for people who need one diopter for distance vision and another (or none at all) for close-up vision.

I hope it's possible to improve the field of view to match ordinary glasses. I also wonder if it'd be possible to change different parts of the lens to have different focal points, or change fast enough to allow for the equivalent of foveated rendering, such that you could look around at different things in your field of view and have them all appear in focus.

I'd pay a lot if they can get a full enough field of view. I detest bi/varifocals, but I detest switching glasses more. The entire experience of glasses is a constant annoyance in my life.

I am thrilled that this exists. I've been hoping for this since my near vision started going south twenty years ago. My current options are reading glasses (dollar store ones are as good as prescription) or hope that accommodating intraocular lenses are available when I eventually have to undergo cataract surgery. Bifocals are disorienting, multifocal contacts sort of work but I still need readers. It sucks to be on the fringe of so much medical technology - have to pay for the insurance but get squat in terms of treatment.

Hoping that it or some next-gen product comes to the US double-quick.

What's your concern with accommodating intraocular lenses? Something that works with your particular vision issues? I live in a relatively rural region, and the eye care center that has them as an option is one of the big TV advertisers.

All current IOLs are non-accommodating: the multifocal IOLs work by having multiple rings beam two or three different focal lengths into your retina simultaneously.

The way a natural accommodating lens works is that your optical musculature physically flexes the lens to focus on the point you're looking at. The current non-accommodating multifocal lenses are stiff and fixed; the implantee handles the transition between focal points entirely in the mind's eye. While accommodating IOLs are being developed, they are currently not on the commercial market.

I have a multifocal IOL that I honestly love, and has allowed me to abandon wearing any glasses; I have crisp and natural vision except in certain edge-cases. Other people, however, never adapt, or dislike the artifacts of the multifocal rings (mostly halos around bright lights such as headlights).

I guess I don't understand. This describes a single beam...

https://www.bauschsurgical.com/cataract/crystalens-and-truli...

You're correct that Crystalens had indeed been approved by the FDA, but has not been widely used because of issues with the IOL explanting. While there are resources on the web related to it, I'm not sure any surgeon is currently implanting it. My apologies if that's not accurate, but I wouldn't get a Crystalens today.

https://www.healio.com/news/ophthalmology/20230818/blog-thre...

iwanttocomment beat me to it. AFAIK, accommodating IOLs have been in development/trials forever. I wasn't aware of Crystalens but looks like it is not ready for prime time.

You can order here: https://pay.peraichi.com/fohjh4665zd/shop/m5yygz2eu4v?landin...

Only 79,200 yen surprisingly.

Initial Setup Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSqFjZfrH8

I'm guessing that's Japanese Yen? Even so a bit too pricey for me.

Asking genuinely—are there places that use yen other than the Japanese kind? I wasn’t aware of any and a casual search came up empty.

It’s a misnomer as there is the Chinese Renminbi, known as the yuan. The yen and yuan have similar/same symbol. So people confuse the two as Japanese Yen and Chinese Yen even though that isn’t remotely correct.

When you use just “yen” it should be always known as the Japanese currency. There should be no need for clarification.

The confusion maybe comes from misunderstanding of history as the yuan (yoo-ahn) and yen both can mean “round”, like a coin.

thanks I didn't know that, I typed yen into XE.com's input and it suggested 3 currencies, Japanese first, it was a bit dark and didn't have my glasses so I didn't see that Chinese was Chinese Yuan, I had a minor memory that China also used "Yen" as name of their currency, from some time in high school I suppose, and so I took it as being that.

One suggestion was also Yemen so probably the input has some Levenshtein distance awareness to it

What the other comment said is 100% correct, and it's a bit puzzling situation.

  - in Japanese language:
      - JPY: 円(*en*, "circle") and '￥'
      - RMB: 元(*gehn*, "root, origin"), "人民元(*jinmin gen*), or "RMB"

  - in Chinese language:
      - RMB: 元(*yuan*) and *the same* '￥'
      - JPY: 日元(*righ-yuan*) and "JPY", and sometimes the same '￥'

  - Character 圓:
      - is used for old JPY and all RMB notes
      - is a traditional, homophonic equivalent of 円 in Japanese and 元 in Chinese

So if something is in:

  - "yuan" -> RMB, "人民元" -> RMB
  - "yen"  -> JPY, "円" -> JPY, "日元" -> JPY
  - `0x5c`, "￥",  "元", it depends(元 is more likely RMB)

Two obvious questions are "why they don't make their own double-struck R symbol" and "why Chinese language mixes up 円 and 元 when there are two perfectly serviceable unambiguous characters". The former, I don't know. Most currency symbols are Unicode anyway so 元 might work? The latter is the most puzzling part. Maybe it's just not-invented-here response to 円 character. But it's a foreign symbol! I've never heard they have issues with existence of the dollar sign itself than what it sometimes represent in some contexts.

~560$

$764 CAD so about the same as the Samsung (w/ eSIM) smartwatch I believe.

you can order there but

https://store.vixion.jp/ :

*We do not ship to overseas addresses.

We ONLY deliver within JAPAN.

Forwarding services exist, if you’re determined to get a unit.

Or here, with some markup: https://www.japantrendshop.com/vixion01-autofocus-eyewear-p-...

People with low vision sometimes use glasses that are a little similar to this but are actual bifocals. The bottom component is ordinary glasses while the top component is telescopic. The telescopic component's focus can be changed, but it's manual. With special training, such glasses can allow¹ people who are otherwise too visually impaired to qualify for a driver's license to receive a limited driver's license with special training.

Glasses like those in TFA might be easier for drivers to adapt to, and their autofocus mechanisms might also be reusable for proper bioptic lenses, if that proves to be better for driving for one reason or another (i.e., some people actually need magnification, not just differentiated focus). I imagine if the manufacturer ever gets approval for such uses, those customers won't care too much what the glasses look like.

1: https://www.webmd.com/eye-health/what-to-know-about-driving-...

Ocutech make an autofocus bioptic, which uses a time-of-flight sensor.

https://www.ocutech.com/ocutech-bioptics-products-overview/k...

Interesting to see Ocutech pop up on HN!

I've used one of their manual ones for years and it made a huge difference for me in being able to view presentations and lectures while also taking notes. However, the experience is not like traditional bifocals, it's like having a small telescope stuck to your glasses (because of course that's what it is). The telescope has a relatively narrow field of view as you'd expect, and is only visible to one eye. Frankly I don't understand how folks can use these while driving or moving around.

As far as I know, the main use while driving is reading signs, so the rest of your vision is good enough to drive, but you might need the bioptic to read a street sign for navigating. I never really thought of them for lectures, but that’s not a bad idea. However, in an era of smartphones, having a ready telephoto zoom (digital or optical) in your pocket is also quite handy. (Not that it would help while driving!)

You're absolutely right about the cell phone thing; I use my phone for things like reading distant signs (while mostly stationary) and reading restaurant menus that are posted on the wall (I probably have taken hundreds of such pictures). Using the phone to watch videos or keep up with whiteboard exercises would be challenging without a tripod to hold the phone and probably a custom camera app that lets you quickly pan a live zoomed image.

I've always found it hard to quickly locate distant objects in my ocutech though given the limited FOV, and doing it at driving speed must require a lot of deliberate practice.

>>> These Hi-Tech Bifocals Improved My Eyesight but Made Me Look Like a Huge Dork

Okay, but I wonder if there are any negative aspects. ;-)

Disclosure: Dork.

These would be great as workday wear (when not on Zoom.)

I started looking into computer glasses (short focal length) and quickly realized I’d need 2-3 pairs for all my work situations.

The daily charge could pay off if it reduces eye strain and perhaps even ends the workday sooner via quicker reading.

Would there be any pitfalls using these primarily to focus on screens of varying distances?

$555 sounds very cheap for possibly "the last pair of glasses you'll ever buy".

Progressives cost half as much but you'll have to buy a new pair on a regular basis.

I don't really care how they look (although anything made in Japan probably looks far better than anything else), but I wish the author, erm, focused on important things, like - what's the field of vision in these? Are they blocking peripheral vision, i.e. can someone drive with those?

From the article:

> Also, ViXiON has made it very clear that this isn’t a medically cleared product and doesn’t advise using the glasses while driving or any other potentially rigorous tasks.

> doesn’t advise using the glasses while driving or any other potentially rigorous tasks

"doesn't advise" is an euphemism Gizmodo chose.

On Vixion's site [0] they have a "Forbidden" section, with driving as the first bullet point, with a pictogram to make it clear even if you can't read the text.

They absolutely don't want you in a crash, and surely not with their glasses blamed for it.

[0] https://store.vixion.jp/

The size of the lenses and their mountings makes it obvious that the field-of-view will be severely restricted - probably acceptable for desk work after a period of adaptation, but I wouldn't want to wear them when walking around.

I'm unconvinced that these will be better than well-dispensed varifocal glasses or multifocal contacts for the vast majority of users.

Ive been reading about myopia, mostly some recent work out of japan. Our obsession with 20/20, at distance, seems to be exacerbating the issue. Im not sure that these will help. We perhaps need to admit that not everyone needs to shoot a gun, fly an airplane or even drive a car. The japanese work is showing that making things perfect at 20ft often makes the eye contort itself to see at the sub-foot range where most reading occurs. Acceptable vision at closer ranges would be a better standard than forcing perfect vision at distance, or at every distance via glasses that change focus.

Hopefully you've already come across myopic defocus lenses and low dose atropine in your reading about myopia. Overfocus in peripheral vision is a known trigger of myopia progression.

> We perhaps need to admit that not everyone needs to shoot a gun, fly an airplane or even drive a car.

“Not everyone can become a doctor, not everyone needs an education”

Always easy to decide for other people, right?

But education doesnt do damage. Glasses to create 20/20 vision at distance, when a person spends so much time at sub-foot distances, damages the eye.

My experience is that that has limited validity. I wear varifocals, but for the past few years have had some single focus lenses set a bit further out than reading lenses. The motivation is to be able to see the top of a large screen, which is difficult with varifocals as you have to cant your head back. These intermediate lenses are very comfortable around the house, and fine for walking around to the local shop. However they are not adequate for driving. I could probably pass the UK test for legality, but I do need sharp vision further off to anticipate signs and hazards.

BTW - most reading is at sub-foot distance? I think not!

Tablets and phones. And if you are a kid in a japanese school learning to draw characters, you are likely focused on a small piece of paper perhaps six inches from your face.

Presumably they can be adjusted to only provide the minimum amount of correction necessary for the user's eyes to achieve correct focus, thus having the eye muscles always relaxed.

Only if the glasses detect something far away would it be adjusting itself to the "strongest" power. At intermediate ranges it would be using an intermediate power, and if the distance is something that you can read without correction it would become a (non-prescription) lens.

Article would have been good with a picture on someone's face. Seems important given the title. I'm the kind of nerd who would wear high tech shit that makes me look like a dork if it was cool enough or the utility was big enough, but even I have my limits - and being able to see expressions and make eye contact is a pretty big deal with humans.

If they could adjust for LED headlights at night, this would be even more of a no-brainer. I'd still wear them if needed.

Surely focusing for you untrains your eyes how to focus and is bad for you in the long run.

This article is really lacking for such an interesting product. I am curious to get some insights from actual users from this to see how they feel about it. I guess one more thing to remember to charge can be annoying.

Do they also automatically correct for for muscle weakness? Some people's (my) prescription involves the use of prism lenses to correct for this and would otherwise get double-vision without them.

Would be awesome if they did im looking to get checked up again but the only company that does those lenses here is backed up by 3 months

Boating. Switching between charts (or a device) and the horizon. Switching glasses to switch targets makes it tough to track that target on the horizon.

And hopefully they float.

I'd love to give it a try. I suspect it feels very odd to have it refocus just as my eyes are also refocusing, to the best of their very meager ability.

How easy would it be to add AR to this in future? It seems like small enough that you would not need too much extra mass from displays.

This gadgets seem pretty amazing, and I would gladly dump that amount into a product that works... think about it; my prescription glasses are already in that price range and they come with periodic visits to the optician.

BUT, I would be much more pleased to learn about treatments that stop and revert the aging in our optical systems. Glasses feel like such a low-tech crutch for our extremely advanced optical machinery...

Do these have as short a vertical field of view as it looks like they do?

Shame I won’t live long enough to see Deus Ex/Cyberpunk cyber eyes.

I think I'll just stick with multiple glasses.

I find progressive glasses and multifocal contacts help vs. "dumb" versions but mostly I still switch glasses.

i wear multifocal contact lenses. has been a game changer for me.

They work just well enough to fail for me. Still need reading glasses for close-in work.

Yea same. But for me reading glasses have gone from necessity to comfort.

Why do they look like they have 15deg fov?

Uhh.. or you could just wear multifocal contact lenses which work via concentric rings instead of dividing your vision into halves. Your brain very quickly learns to focus on objects up close more easily, and you don’t look like a dork.

https://coopervision.com/contact-lenses/biofinity-multifocal

I love these things. They’ve been on the market since 2011.

I got fitted with these last year after finally losing the ability to focus on small text at reasonable distances. They work shockingly well for me. I don’t recall there being any period of adjustment at all.

They are good but a lot depends on the individual. My combination of presbyopia and refractive errors including astigmatism mean I can get close with multifocals but still need reading glasses. My very experienced optometrist had me try four different combinations. He said the best of the bunch was the best the technology can do and that one could not let me avoid glasses.

Paging LeVar Burton for endorsement. This looks like a Gen 1 VISOR.

Neat tech, I wonder if getting too used to it could actually lead to degredation of your sight.

I would not be wearing this outdoors but count me in for household activities!

Not clear, can you get prescription versions?

I’ve been having issues with my bi-focals lately. Looking far and cell phone at fine, but laptop sucks.

These can definitely help in that case, but yeah look weird.

I got my doctor to write me a computer prescription. Half as strong as my regular glasses and single vision perfect for computer work and worthless for everything else.

Thanks. I’ve read about those so was thinking on asking about that in my next visit.

I did that as well and then ordered some super inexpensive glasses online (Zenni) and have been super happy with them. I ended up buying a second pair that I leave at work so I don’t have to carry them around with me.

> The ViXion01 is rated for 10 hours of battery life and some water resistance with an IPX3 rating. At 1.78 ounces, they are fairly lightweight, although I’d like to see how they feel after a few hours.

I appreciate the honesty in acknowledging that they didn't even spend a few hours with the glasses, but man am I sick of the low effort content on the internet today.

We're talking about a pair of $555 glasses and the author of this review straight up admits that they didn't use them for very long at all. This is about more than the weight—they're glasses! Do you get headaches after a few hours? We wouldn't know because she didn't wear them long enough to tell!

If you look at what she actually wrote, the only thing that wasn't drawn from the product description is that it wasn't hard to set up and she looked at some signage and was impressed but had a hard time with smaller text.

Is this what reviewing a product has to look like in 2024? Does anyone actually give more than 20 minutes to something before writing up a piece on it and moving on to the next thing?

I agree, I was looking for the rest of the write up, assuming I had to scroll through more ads or click through to another page or something. That was one of the least informative tech pieces I can recall reading.

Unfortunately this is what the companies that pay for content pay for, to the extent that if you do better you would get penalized either by not getting as much money or not getting published at all, and obviously she wants to make money from the effort she put into writing it. Which I'm guessing still took half a day's worth of work what with incidental stuff like sending off emails and answering editors etc. Since Gizmodo probably paid 400 dollars for this that's a pretty good rate, but how many other things did she spend time writing that didn't get bought? So - in the end - this is the quality we end up with, which ironically relates to another recent HN frontpager https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547773

Don't see a way out of it. The best one can hope for is that she writes a second piece - a week with hi-tech bifocals - and manages to sell that one too.

Conversely, the last blog post we wrote was 8,000+ words and took months of testing, yet the average 'read' time is under 2 minutes. I'm convinced there's a correlation between interested technical users and the blocking of analytics scripts - but if I were to naively look at the data, I'd also come to the conclusion that "lower effort" was better return on investment. I wonder if these tech journalism establishments are following their analytics and A/B testing themselves into oblivion.

It's a weird trap. With no analytics, it'd be difficult to attribute any conversions to a particular user type, so I'd wager that, if the hypothesis that lower tech users don't block ads/analytics holds up, the metrics skew that way. We can't make any realistic assertions without the data for that user group. Shrug.

It's like meat and potatoes, though. Yes you can fill a website up with low effort filler content that keeps your viewers engaged and visiting, but in the long run you also need some solid meaty stuff.

A lot of that sorta stuff moved over to youtube because it was easier to monetize. I think a hybrid of the two is the nicest (reading charts from youtube videos sucks)

Being completely fair to the article writer, it looks like this is all part of coverage for a trade show. Do folks at trade shows usually get multiple hours to personally spend with devices they write about such that we could have expected this article to have information about what it feels like to wear for hours at a time?

Nope, that's good context that I missed.

Easily missed, as far as I can tell, the only indication of this is the 'Best of IFA 2024' SVG and a small hashtag at the bottom saying 'IFA 2024'.

There are also incorrect implications it seems, that you can order this from outside Japan by quoting the price in USD rather than JPY.

I don't mind the low-depth trade show coverage, but I would expect it to be a bit more clearly signposted for anyone who doesn't understand the acronym 'IFA'.

Overall though, Gizmodo has really crashed since Gawker got acquired, and most of their writing is now minimal effort. I haven't quite got as far as unsubscribing to their RSS feed, but that's mostly through pure apathy, rather than a desire to keep seeing their drivel in my reader.

Just a little contet:

I buy new glasses each year. I alternate which glasses I buy every other year: every day progressives with sunglass tint, and then work/computer (bifocal, larger target area) glasses. Each of my purchases from a normal ophthalmologist stocking all the usual brands cost >$1000 before insurance discounts kick in.

$555 for wearable glasses is less than half what I'm usually investing in. And with the strength of my prescriptions, I already look dorky enough.

Have you looked into Zenni optical?

And if Zenni is too expensive, Goggles4u.

Late response, but: my head is huge. I need to try glasses on before I order them. And yes, I know about their stores in AZ. I’ve actually ordered from them in the past when I was poor(er), but it’s really hard for me to buy glasses (and shoes) from brand X, which offered a good fit last year won’t offer same fit next year. True for glasses and shoes.

Yah. My first reaction was “$555? That’s not bad compared to current glasses prices.” Especially when online retailers won’t sell certain prescriptions.

>$555 for wearable glasses is less than half what I'm usually investing in. And with the strength of my prescriptions, I already look dorky enough.

Yeah I make mine last several years, but I think the last pair I bought were $700-800 out of pocket after insurance paid for the exam and a couple of hundred towards it.

most of the effort is spent on writing and A/B testing clickbait headlines

This is what happens when you decide designers are no longer necessary.

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