Tag Archives: eyeglasses

The VIVIFoCAL S1 Glasses Focus Themselves So Your Eyes Don’t Have To

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Your phone focuses by firing an invisible laser pulse at whatever you’re aiming it at, timing the bounce, and telling a tiny motor to move some glass. The whole loop finishes in a few hundredths of a second and nobody has thought about it since roughly 2017. VIVIFoCAL has taken that identical hardware recipe, a time of flight sensor, a microcontroller and an actuator, and bolted it onto a pair of glasses pointed at the world instead of at your brunch. The S1 measures how far away the thing you’re looking at is, works out the optical power your eyes need, and mechanically shifts the lenses into position in under 0.1 seconds. It’s autofocus, except the sensor is on your face.

Dr. Zhao, who earned his doctorate at a world-leading university and previously ran an optical R&D laboratory at a major optics company, built VIVIFoCAL around a piece of physics that has not yet been widely adopted by the general public. The S1 uses Alvarez lenses, two complementary freeform elements that change optical power when one slides sideways across the other. Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez patented the principle, and it was then stranded for decades because somebody had to do the sliding. A motor does it now. The result covers 8 inches to infinity in a 40 gram frame, and it launches with VIP pricing from $289.

Designer: VIVIFoCAL

Click here to Reserve Now: $10 (VIP pricing from $289).

A laser, a motor, and the 1967 patent working in the background

Three sensors do the work rather than one. A time of flight laser reads distance, a G-sensor tracks head posture, and an infrared wear detection sensor tells the glasses whether they’re on a face at all, which is how the battery survives being pushed up onto your head mid-conversation. The microcontroller sits between them, converting a distance reading into a lens position and commanding the motor in a single pass. The lenses simply change optical power to match whatever distance you’re looking at, the same job your eyes handle on their own before presbyopia kicks in. VIVIFoCAL calls that loop Instant Focus, and the same time of flight hardware we’ve watched migrate into phones, robot vacuums and door locks is what makes it affordable in eyewear.

Fitting a moving lens assembly, a rangefinder, a motion sensor, a microcontroller, a motor and a battery into something that still reads as eyewear is the harder half of this product. VIVIFoCAL has pushed the electronics into the brow bar and the temple arms, keeping the optical stack shallow enough that the frame sits on a face instead of announcing itself as hardware. The 160.5 x 160 x 43.5mm envelope is ordinary spectacle territory, which is the entire argument. Every packaging decision is downstream of one goal, helping the wearer see clearly across distances without thinking about the machine doing it.

Progressive lenses ask you to tilt your chin… this doesn’t

Presbyopia is projected to affect 2.1 billion people by 2030, and the standard answer for most of them is a progressive lens with three prescriptions blended into one lens, near at the bottom, distance at the top, intermediate smeared between. Finding the right part of the glass means tilting your chin, and the tradeoff is the narrow tunnel vision that progressive wearers describe, with softness creeping in toward the edges. VIVIFoCAL calls its answer Full-Lens Clarity, where the Alvarez lenses deliver one consistent optical power across the whole lens at every setting instead of splitting it into zones. There is nothing to hunt for and less peripheral distortion to work around. I’ve watched that chin-tilt dance play out for years, so the appeal is obvious.

Progressive glasses are generally built around everyday reading tasks, and for closer or more detailed work plenty of wearers still reach for a second pair or a magnifier. S1’s focusing range starts at 8 inches, which brings fine detail inside the same lens handling everything else. VIVIFoCAL demoed the glasses at WonderFest 2026 against a 1/35 scale miniature, the sort of precision hobby work that has kept optical visors and loupes in business for a century, and the testers who work with their hands responded the way you’d expect. One early tester shared that using S1 in a data center was a productivity gain and a huge plus, because he could walk past equipment and read tiny serial numbers without interrupting his workflow to take out extra readers, switch to other glasses, or use additional visual aids. He no longer carries multiple pairs when he leaves the house.

Forty grams, three nose pad sizes, and all-day power

VIVIFoCAL designed around the fact that head sizes and nose bridge heights vary far more than eyewear brands usually admit, which is why S1 ships with flexible spring hinges and three sizes of interchangeable nose pads to adapt across face shapes. The frame lands at 40 grams bare and 50 with the magnetic front clip, built on TR90 temples, the same material that has quietly taken over lightweight frames and wearable arms across the industry. Those numbers matter because forgetting you’re wearing them is the whole point of automating focus in the first place. A 250mAh battery holds up through 8 hours of constant refocusing and refills over USB-C in about an hour, with normal use stretching to a full day. Glasses that can run flat is still a new idea to make peace with.

A separate pair of lenses attaches behind the Alvarez elements, so one pair carries your prescription to see near and far. Magnetic polarized sunglass lenses snap onto the front for outdoor use with adaptive focus still running underneath. The polycarbonate lenses carry anti-reflective and anti-smudge coatings, transmit more than 90 percent of light, and sit inside a field of view above 110 degrees. The app adds a ±0.5D fine-tuning range on top of the automatic correction, which is how the glasses absorb the slow drift of a presbyopic prescription instead of being replaced. Presbyopia correction tops out at 3.5D, so the deepest cases fall outside what S1 can currently handle.

The bet VIVIFoCAL is making on moving glass

The company isn’t chasing this idea alone. Other teams are working on adaptive focus through liquid crystal lenses or eye tracking instead of a mechanical shift, and the category is young enough that the approaches are still diverging. VIVIFoCAL is betting on the refractive route, real glass moving to change optical power rather than a pixelated layer simulating it, and that bet buys the two things that matter most in eyewear you keep on your face all day. S1 holds above 90 percent light transmittance and a field of view past 110 degrees, which is why the image through it behaves like a lens instead of a screen.

Alvarez lenses have been a lab curiosity since 1967 for one reason, which is that the sliding had to be automated by something small enough to live inside a temple arm. Sensors, motors and microcontrollers have finally shrunk far enough to make that trivial, which makes S1 a triumph of packaging, and packaging is where most wearables actually get decided. Autofocus earned its invisibility in cameras by working so fast nobody noticed it, and 0.1 seconds across 8 inches to infinity puts the same disappearing act in front of your eyes. S1 ships with a 1-year warranty, and a refundable $10 deposit locks in VIP pricing at $289 ahead of the official launch, with either the prescription lens service or the sunglass lens bundle included depending on which one you need. Sixty years is a long time for a good idea to wait for its motor.

Click here to Reserve Now: $10 (VIP pricing from $289).

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A Button, A Loop, And The Problem Of Where To Put Your Glasses

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Look, I’ve lost my glasses in some pretty creative places. Between the couch cushions. On top of my head while frantically searching for them. In the fridge once (don’t ask). And I know I’m not alone in this very specific modern anxiety: that moment when you take your glasses off and suddenly have nowhere to put them that won’t end in disaster.

Cubitts, the London-based eyewear brand that’s been quietly revolutionizing how we think about spectacles, has come up with a solution so elegantly simple you’ll wonder why no one thought of it sooner. It’s called On The Wing, and it’s basically a small leather loop that attaches to any button on your shirt. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And somehow, it’s brilliant.

Designer: Cubitts

Made from supple vegetable-tanned leather, On The Wing transforms whatever you’re wearing into a temporary perch for your frames. It’s designed for those in-between moments when you’re not wearing your glasses but don’t want to commit them to a case or risk the inevitable “left them at the restaurant” panic. You slip the loop onto a button, hang your glasses from it, and go about your business. No stretched-out necklines from hanging them on your collar. No bulging pockets. No setting them down on a table and walking away without them.

The design came out of a collaboration between Cubitts and industrial designer Daniel Weil, part of a broader collection of accessories that share the brand’s philosophy: functional, beautiful, and made to last. Weil has spent decades thinking about how objects interact with daily life, and you can feel that consideration in On The Wing’s simplicity. It’s barely visible when you’re wearing it, but always there when you need it.

What I love about this is how it acknowledges a real problem that glasses wearers deal with constantly. If you wear glasses full-time, you know the dance. You take them off to look at your phone up close, or to rub your eyes, or because you’re transitioning from reading to eating. And then what? Do you set them on the table where they’ll get scratched? Balance them precariously on your head? Shove them in a pocket where they’ll get smudged or bent?

The thing is, glasses have become such an integral part of personal style. People spend serious time choosing frames that reflect their aesthetic, whether that’s vintage-inspired, minimalist, or boldly contemporary. Cubitts understands this better than most brands. Their frames are designed to be enduring companions, repaired and serviced over many years rather than treated as disposable fashion. So it makes sense that they’d think about what happens to your glasses when they’re not on your face.

On The Wing costs about $14 and comes in a few colors to match different wardrobe aesthetics. It’s the kind of accessory that feels almost too simple to be worth it until you start using it and realize how much mental energy you were spending on the where-do-I-put-my-glasses question. There’s something charmingly analog about the solution too. In a world where every problem seems to require an app or a gadget with a battery, here’s a piece of leather and a button doing exactly what they need to do. No charging required. No setup. No learning curve.

Will a leather loop on your shirt button change your life? Probably not. But will it solve a small, persistent annoyance in a way that feels considered and well-designed? Absolutely. And sometimes that’s exactly what good design should do: notice the little frustrations we’ve all accepted as normal and offer something better. For anyone who’s ever patted down their pockets in a panic or retraced their steps through a entire building looking for their glasses, On The Wing makes a lot of sense. It’s the kind of simple solution that feels obvious in retrospect, which is usually the mark of genuinely smart design.

The post A Button, A Loop, And The Problem Of Where To Put Your Glasses first appeared on Yanko Design.

Magnifying glasses turn into classic magnifying lens when not in use

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One of the things that I have to accept as a person that’s getting older and that has bad eyesight is the fact that I can’t read books with small fonts anymore. I’m not yet at the point where magnifying glasses are actually needed but I know we’ll eventually get there. There are more convenient ways now of using magnifying lenses instead of the old school way of actually holding a lens in one hand with the reading material on the other hand. This concept for magnifying glasses is something I may eventually want or need.

Designer: Jongcheol Yang

The VAN magnifying glasses concept fixes the problem of unnecessary parts that may cause inconvenience or even dizziness to those that need to use this kind of glasses. The idea is for this to be similar to reading glasses in a sense that you only wear them when you need to use them. The magnifying part is only placed on the lower part where the magnifying lens is located. And when you’re feeling dizzy or you need to rest your eyes, you just have to look straight ahead since the lens part will not be there anymore.

The other cool thing about this concept is that if you don’t need to wear the glasses, you can just fold up the front and then the “legs”. It will then turn into the classic magnifying glass that we’re used to and then you can store it in your bag. They don’t show it in the product renders but maybe if you just rotate the lens itself away from the stem, then you can use it like a regular magnifying glass without having to wear it as actual glasses.

It’s an interesting concept for sure, particularly for people who already have a hard time reading things that have small prints. Of course it’s another thing to add to things you need to bring and to mind. But at least it solves some of the issues that come with current magnifying glasses.

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These IR-blocking sunglasses are great for your eyes as well as for your privacy

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Most regular sunglasses only block UV rays, but not infrared rays from damaging your eyes. Kolari hopes to change that with their cutting-edge IR-blocking sunglasses that protect your eyes from the sun, and your face from unwanted facial recognition systems. Pretty cool, right?

When you wear regular sunglasses, the tinted lenses help cut the bright glare of the daytime sun. This does two things – it helps you see clearly without needing to half-shut your eyes, but it also makes your pupils dilate to let more light information in. Conventional sunglasses don’t do much to protect your eyes while they’re dilated in the daytime. The most glasses will ever do is block UV, blue light, and glare… but there’s one culprit that nobody focuses on, infrared. Humans don’t see infrared rays, but they can have long-term effects on your eyes. Sure, one can argue that you’d need high exposure to infrared rays, but think about how often you step out into the sun on a daily basis and all that begins adding up. While your regular Sunglass Hut shades won’t do much about IR rays, one company’s trying to make sunglasses safer for your eyes. Kolari Vision started its journey designing IR-protective accessories for cameras, but is now looking at the bigger picture by designing protective eyewear for everyone. The Kolari Shades are made from actual glass, and can block UV and up to 99% of infrared light from making its way into your eyes. This doesn’t impact the clarity with which you see, but it does help protect your vision… just like any sunglass should!

Designer: Ilija Melentijevic, PhD (founder of Kolari Vision)

Click Here to Buy Now: $169. Hurry, less than 72-hours to go!

Styled to look like a stylish pair of sunglasses, the Kolari Shades give your eyes the comfort and protection they need in the outdoors. “Our goal was to maximize clarity, eliminate color shifts, and block all unwanted wavelengths in order to give your eyes the most rested, neutral experience possible to minimize eye fatigue. Our beta testers are calling the result a breath of fresh air for your eyes,” say the folks at Kolari Vision. Originally founded as a photography company, the folks at Kolari realized that the gear made for cameras seemed to be better in quality than anything the eyewear industry produced. The irony being that your eyes are so much more precious than a $500 camera… so why is it that only camera sensors get taken such good care of, but not the original human cameras – our eyes??

Bridging that gap, the Kolari Shades offer a one-of-a-kind IR and UV protection to your eyes. The sunglasses are fitted with lenses that look just like your average tinted lenses, but they possess the unique ability to block anywhere between 90-99% of all infrared rays and 100% of all UV rays shining through the glass and into your eyes. The benefits of this are two-fold – there’s an obvious health benefit, given how eyes (just like skin) can respond adversely to excessive exposure to certain wavelengths of infrared light. However, a second benefit comes in the form of privacy protection. Most cameras rely on capturing some form of IR to ‘see’, and the shades can effectively block this ability. This prevents unwanted cameras from capturing facial recognition information without your consent. In fact, the iPhone relies on an IR blaster to power its FaceID unlocking feature – which can be disabled with the Kolari Shades. Sure, that means you need to either take off your sunglasses to unlock your phone (or just use the pattern lock instead), but the privacy implications are far-reaching too, as people like law enforcement can’t maliciously unlock your phone by holding it up to your face.

Kolari Shades are truly color-neutral and protect your eyes from all damaging wavelengths of light.

The beauty of the Kolari Shades is that their spectacles are made from actual glass – a distinction that sets it apart from even luxury eyewear. Most eyewear companies use a form of clear plastic for their lenses; a sensible choice because they’re scratch-resistant and they don’t shatter… but the one big caveat with these lenses lies their imperfections. Micro-imperfections in these lenses (even in the ones found in high-end tinted eyewear) can warp the way you see the world, which is why glass offers a MUCH better alternative. Kolari Vision’s lenses rely on industry-leading Corning Gorilla Glass (yes, the same durable one used in your phone) coupled with 51 layers of anti-reflective and anti-smudge coating. While Gorilla Glass can often be 10x more expensive than your standard plastic lenses, Kolari Vision’s still managed to keep their costs competitive, offering cutting-edge materials for the same price you’d pay for a pair of Ray-Bans.

Preserve your anonymity — Kolari Shades block infrared-based facial recognition systems.

Corning Gorilla Glass and titanium frames make the Kolari Shades extra tough.

The glasses aren’t the only durable part of the Kolari Shades either. The aviator-inspired eyewear sport frames are made from titanium, enhancing the overall durability to a level you’d probably find in smartphones (hint: the titanium iPhone 15 Pro and Galaxy S24 Ultra). You can choose between silver or gold-plated frames, while Kolari offers three lens options – a basic tinted-black (90% IR blocking), a bronze-tinted ultra lens (99% IR blocking), and an ultra gradient lens (with the same 99% IR blocking). The company’s working on newer frame designs and even plans on offering mirror-finish lenses that should take your eyewear’s swag to an entirely new level!

Click Here to Buy Now: $169. Hurry, less than 72-hours to go!

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