A step beyond conventional corrective eyewear, the Ocumetics Bionic Lens, invented by Dr. Garth Webb of Ocumetics Technology Corp, is a painless implant that can give patients the ability to see beyond the normal scope of 20/20 (perfect) vision.

The results were presented at a cataract and refractive surgery conference after years of research, experimentation and iteration, funded to the tune of $3,000,000 for research, patents, tests and trials. The procedure for implanting these, however, is much faster: just eight minutes in a chair.

The lens is not just an overlay but a surgical implant, attaching to the actual lens of the eye. Vision is completely corrected as soon as the installation is complete. Further, the implant helps protect eyes against future cataracts by defending it against decay and is touted to be safer than laser eye surgery. Its creators hope the lenses will be out and on the market by 2017.

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Being fitted for contact lenses isn’t really a difficult or painful process. A few minutes in the optician’s chair and you’re out of the door with a prescription in hand. It definitely was not that easy in the early days of contacts, though. In the 1940s, those suckers were thick, made of glass, and came with an insanely uncomfortable-looking fitting process.

To get the shape of the lens just right, the optician had to smush some impression-forming slime right onto your eyeball on the end of a suction cup-type device. It was like having a dental impression taken, but on your eyeball. The actress in this newsreel video had to have been paid an awful lot not to scream in horror as that stuff was hardening on her eye.

After the impressions were made, skilled technicians went to work forming, sanding, and filing little discs of glass for wearers to shove into their eye sockets. The newsreel even refers to the lenses as “glasses,” and the model looks exceedingly uncomfortable wearing them. But, hey, guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, right? At least the external glasses that you don’t have to pry out of your eyes every six hours.

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This is going to be a very poorly-sighted world eventually. A huge portion of our population has been staring at computer screens since childhood, meaning two things: eye damage will be incredibly widespread since done by even the looking at a screen for a minimal amount of time, as it adds up over several decades; and optometry will become a very lucrative field (pay attention, millennials). One concept aims to fight back against the oncoming myopia epidemic.

The i-Free is a clip-on digital lens meant to help “weak-sighted” people view their computer screen without glasses or contacts. The idea is quite simple: instead of wearing glasses or contacts, this lens would be auto-corrective in order to produce images to fit your corrective lens prescription. A touch control system would allow you to slide its corrective powers along a nearsighted/farsighted spectrum.

The execution, however, is what may raise questions. The necessary technology for the i-Free isn’t explained at all in the idea’s description renderings, so it may be an idea for a while. But it certainly would be nice to comfortably view your device’s screen while at the same time fighting blindness.

The post For Sore Eyes: Concept Allows Glasses-Free Computer Use first appeared on Gajitz.