#HTE

Low-Tech Eyeglasses with User-Adjustable Water Lenses

Fourteen years ago, we covered a brilliantly-designed pair of eyeglasses with water-filled lenses. Created for users in developing nations by British inventor and Oxford professor Joshua Silver, the glasses obviate the need for opticians (who are in short supply in poor countries), as the user can tune their own prescription.

The way the glasses work is, a water-filled syringe is temporarily mounted on each stem and plugged into the lenses:

The user rotates the syringes back and forth, which adjusts the amount of water within each lens, until they can see perfectly.

Once the user’s got their prescription dialed in, the syringes are removed, and the user’s got 20-20.

It looks pretty cool in action:

Today Silver runs an organization called the Centre for Vision in the Developing World, which has provided 100,000 pairs of his adaptive glasses to people in over 30 countries. They reckon they will have to multiply that a bit, as “More than 2 billion people in the world today need glasses but don’t have them.” They also cite that “100 million school-aged children cannot read the blackboard in class.”

CVDW ran a crowdfunding campaign in 2017 to raise the funds to distribute 50,000 pairs of glasses to children in developing nations. The funding target was $67,971, but they wound up with a paltry $4,671–just 6% of their goal.

According to CBC Radio, the adaptable glasses cost just $1 to produce. So I’m wondering:

Might a retooled campaign succeed if they appealed to people’s selfishness, rather than just the ability to donate? What if it was “Buy a pair for yourself, pay enough to send some multiple of pairs to children”?

For instance, I would happily buy a pair of these glasses to use as reading glasses at home or in my shop, where I need to wear a different prescription in order to do woodworking, and I’d pay for an extra 50 or 100 pairs to send to the countries that need it. (I might even leave the syringes on, to fine-tune for detailed work.)

Similarly, I bet you could get people to pay anywhere from $20 to $100 for a pair of these to use as a backup/emergency set of eyeglasses. Target disaster preppers.

I personally wouldn’t wear these out in public, for fear of drawing attention (I’m a minority and I live in a rural area where let’s just say, there is no one who looks like me). But if you could give these glasses a hash-taggable name and get Kanye to wear a pair, perhaps people more carefree in their appearance would find them hip enough to wear outside of the house, and buy themselves a pair and pay for many multiples.

I do hope that Silver re-tools the campaign and re-launches it at some point.

Speaking of crowdfunding, don’t forget that this week Craighton Berman, serial crowdfund-ee, is giving a free crash course in how designers can tackle it. It’s on Wednesday, Feb. 23rd at 2pm EST and you can sign up here. Professor Silver, if by some chance you’re reading this, do tune in–I can guarantee the information will be worth your time, and your invention is too good to not fulfill its ambition.