Dynamist Blog

Progress As Far as the Eye Can See

In The Future and Its Enemies, I use contact lenses to exemplify open-ended progress. By the 1950s, the basic problem had been solved: to correct vision without damaging the eye. But that wasn't the end of innovation. Instead we got soft lenses, extended wear lenses, bifocal lenses, lenses to block UV rays, lenses to change eye color, and a host of incremental improvements. There's no such thing as a perfect contact lens, and the same lens won't suit everyone. "The future perfect can only be a tense, not a thing," to quote the great Henry Petroski

But what happens when a competing technology--laser surgery--makes your product obsolete, or at least seriously cuts into its market? For contact lenses (as for dentistry when cavities were largely defeated), the obvious strategy is to go for cosmetic enhancement, whether extreme or more subtle. Next comes performance enhancement, as Wired.com's Gretchen Cuda reports:

[Nike] has teamed up with contact lens maker Bausch and Lomb to create performance-enhancing contact lenses called MaxSight. They're a tinted version of daily disposal lenses for athletes that reduce glare and improve visual acuity.

They block nearly all the sun's damaging UVA and UVB rays just like sunglasses, but their optics can also give athletic performance a boost....

The lenses come in amber for sports like baseball and tennis where the wearer must separate fast moving objects from the background, and grey-green for sports like golf, where the background environment is what's visually important. Both colors filter out a significant amount of overall light, but they also sharpen and improve contrast, so they have a brightening effect, says Alan Reichow, who invented the lenses and is a sports vision consultant for Nike.

The amber lenses also turn the wearer's eye's an unsettling shade of red. But when Nike asked players if they'd like to create a version that created less of an evil eye, the answer was an overwhelming "no."

"They felt it gave them a more intimidating look," Reichow said, "and thus an edge over the competition."

Also on the optical beat, Wired.com's Sam Jaffe reports on an opthamologist-turned-inventor/entrepreneur's plans for "supervision," (that's super vision, not oversight) using adaptive optics techniques borrowed from astronomy:

PixelOptics of Roanoke, Virginia, just won a $3.5 million Department of Defense grant to refine its "supervision" technology, which Blum claims could double the quality of a person's eyesight. "Theoretically, this should be able to double the distance that a person can see clearly," he says.

At the heart of PixelOptics' technology are tiny, electronically-controlled pixels embedded within a traditional eyeglass lens. Technicians scan the eyeball with an aberrometer -- a device that measures aberrations that can impede vision -- and then the pixels are programmed to correct the irregularities.

Traditional glasses correct lower-order aberrations like nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatisms. PixelOptics' lenses handle higher-order aberrations that are much more difficult to detect and correct.

Thanks to technologies created for astronomical telescopes and spy satellites, aberrometers can map a person's eye with extreme accuracy. Lasers bounce off the back of the eyeball, and structures in the eye scatter the resulting beam of light.

Now that Lasik has cured my near-sightedness, could someone do something about my growing need for reading glasses?

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