Ideas worth spreading

Autofocusing reading glasses of the future

2,273,350 views |

Nitish Padmanaban |

TEDxBeaconStreet

• November 2019

As you age, you gradually lose the ability to refocus your eyes -- a phenomenon as old as humanity itself -- leading to a reliance on bifocals, contacts and procedures like LASIK surgery. Electrical engineer Nitish Padmanaban offers a glimpse of cutting-edge tech that's truly a sight for sore eyes: dynamic, autofocusing lenses that track your sight and adjust to what you see, both near and far.

As you age, you gradually lose the ability to refocus your eyes -- a phenomenon as old as humanity itself -- leading to a reliance on bifocals, contacts and procedures like LASIK surgery. Electrical engineer Nitish Padmanaban offers a glimpse of cutting-edge tech that's truly a sight for sore eyes: dynamic, autofocusing lenses that track your sight and adjust to what you see, both near and far.

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About the speaker

Nitish Padmanaban

Nitish Padmanaban

Electrical engineer

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Nitish Padmanaban designs systems that combine optics and computation to help improve visual perception.

Nitish Padmanaban, Robert Konrad and Gordon Wetzstein | Science Advances, 2019 | Article

"Autofocals: Evaluating gaze-contingent eyeglasses for presbyopes"

Using a dynamic focus-tunable lens enables the creation of presbyopia correction that can mimic natural accommodation, or refocus. This paper describes the hardware and software that enables the autofocal system described in this talk, accompanied by an in-depth evaluation of its performance on basic vision tasks.

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This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxBeaconStreet, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Read more about TEDx.

Learn more about Zinn Labs and keep up to date on our progress.