“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” noted Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. We tech reporters like to trot the saying out when we’re impressed … but Wednesday afternoon in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, I saw something that helped me finally understand what Clarke was getting at.
On the table before me were an array of eyeglasses, sufficiently indistinguishable from the selection you might see from Warby Parker or Luxottica or on shelves in your local optician’s store. Baked into the frames was a remarkable technology that lets the lenses automatically change their focus based on whatever you’re looking at. If it’s near your eye, it will magnify for those of us who need readers. If it’s far away, it will take the magnification away so you can see clearly.
It’s the result of more than four years of technology magic, $45 or so million in R&D, and technology that’s just a step away from rocket science – because it was invented by an actual rocket scientist.
“We’re redefining eyewear on a really high level,” Niko Eiden, co-founder and CEO of the Finnish startup IXI, told me. “I like to use a camera analogy: fixed focus, manual focus, and then autofocus. What we’re trying to do is autofocus, as compared to fixed focus, which is what we have today.” As one of the 78 million or so Americans who wear progressive lenses (only my mom still calls them bifocals, you know), the concept is instantly appealing.
The graveyard of eyeglass stems, lenses, and eyeglasses of all sorts of shapes and colors before me were meant to help explain the manufacturing process. But it took a second for me to grasp the reality: Eiden was wearing a functioning pair, 22 grams worth of amazing. This isn’t a hypothetical product, CES vaporware. It’s real and it’s spectacular.
Inside the world’s first autofocusing eyeglasses
How does it work? I’m glad you asked. There are three parts to the company’s new product, which will ultimately be called IXI and could probably maybe hopefully sell later this year: lenses that can be tuned, thanks to a unique liquid crystal material sandwiched within two panes of plastic; an autofocus capability, thanks to an eyetracking system that can detect where you are looking and adjust accordingly; and a frame that looks and feels like an ordinary pair of glasses.
And let’s just get this out of the way: yes, you’ll have to charge your eyeglasses, with a USB cable that magnetically grabs onto the frame. I promise you it will be worth it.
A pair of 35mAh batteries sit in the temples at the hinge, small enough that they are unnoticeable but powerful enough for about 18 hours of usage. That’s about 10 times less than what’s in the Ray Ban Meta Gen 2, meaning IXI needs to sip water as parsimoniously as a stranded sailor saving that last jug of water on a desert island.
The electronics doing that sipping are part of a printed circuit board manufactured within the frame of the glasses themselves: There’s a compute unit over the bridge of the nose, circuits tucked neatly into the outside corners, and a series of imaging components for eye tracking. There’s no camera. Instead, the system relies on the reflectivity of the eye itself to measure where you’re looking.
“When an eye rotates with respect to the frame, its fingerprint changes,” Eiden explained. A series of LEDs beam IR light at the eye and a complementary assortment of photodiodes image the reflection that comes back, all at about 60 frames a second – standard rate for eye trackers, he said.
This spectrum of light passes easily through the plastic frame but bounces off of your eye, so it can all be buried from sight like the electronics in your AV cabinet. Because our eyes are actually pretty slow (they take 200-300 milliseconds to refocus), 60fps is much faster. You won’t have time to notice the tuning, in other words.
Eyes on with IXI
To demonstrate, Eiden propped up a sample lens on an arm and beamed a signal to it. A shimmering disc appeared in the center of the lens. With a separate command it vanished, leaving no sign it had been there. I held a lens up to the light and studied it carefully: at just the right angle, I could detect the faintest trace of the electrical circuits sending their tiny commands to the twist of the liquid crystal matter, a series of concentric rings that look a bit like a CD – the sort of thing you’d never notice when wearing a pair of IXIs, of course.
“In some specific reflections you can see something. It’s a Fresnel pattern,” Eiden told me, “but a very special one. It’s not anything you’d find in research.”
In September, IXI acquired the lens manufacturing and development facility of Finnsusp in Finland and has entered into a long-term strategic partnership with Optiswiss, one of Europe’s leading independent lens manufacturers. This followed a $36.5 million round of funding. In November, it unveiled the 22-gram prototype. At CES, it was finally ready to show it off.
It’s a Fresnel pattern. But a very special one.”
Niko Eiden, co-founder and CEO of the Finnish startup IXI
“In the beginning, we thought let’s just license it to tech, but there was no one to license it to. The existing industry is not equipped to do this level of sophistication … so we thought we need to do everything ourselves,” he said. Eiden himself holds a masters degree in aeronautical engineering and started his career at the particle physics center CERN in Switzerland, before making it to Nokia, and now IXI. Oh, and he’s a certified pilot as well (overachiever!).
Data from the eyetracker is fascinating in itself. Blink intervals, for example, provide an intriguing window into behavior and alertness.
“I’ve been wearing these now for five minutes,” Eiden said, checking the screen of a tablet wirelessly connected to his eyewear. “I’ve been 73% anxious, 20% relaxed, and focused, not daydreaming. When you’re working or writing, your blink rate slows down. That’s why you get dry eyes.”
“Baseline blink rate” isn’t necessarily information that you’ll need as a human being, nor is the posture information that can also be extracted. It’s also unlikely to be surfaced in the app you’ll get with the product. But for now, it sure is neat to see.
A pair of IXI eyeglasses won’t be cheap, but they shouldn’t be terribly expensive either. Eiden said they’ll be in the range of high-end eyewear, which can run you €1,000 euros, he said. A small price to pay for magic, no?
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