Cheap Fast Eyeglasses from a Desktop Fabricator 279
purduephotog writes "Doctoral candidate Saul Griffith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and inventor of the Lego powered chocolate printer was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing a device that molds eyeglasses rapidly and cheaply. Best of all, he's motivated for the good of humanity."
Who's the fool? (Score:2, Informative)
Better (Score:5, Informative)
He does it in about 5-10 minutes.
FTA:
Re:I predict... (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
"But efficient lens manufacturing is only half the issue. Proper diagnosis of vision problems is the other half. Current automatic diagnostic technologies are expensive, fragile and error-prone. Because they rely on a patient looking at electronically generated images a few inches away from his or her face, they can lead to incorrect diagnoses. Plus, highly skilled people are required to operate these machines.
To resolve this problem, Griffith has created a prototype device to test the human eye. Patients need only wear the device, which looks like an oversized pair of goggles, and look at the world around them. An electronic sensor superimposed on the goggles monitors the lens in the wearer's eye and adjusts the device's lens to cancel the refractive errors, thus determining the correct prescription.
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Re:The Home-Insudtrial Revolution? (Score:5, Informative)
3D Printers [manufacturingtalk.com]
After all, laser printers used to be incredibly expensive, but they have become inexpensive enough that if someone NEEDS one at home, they CAN afford one. Alternatively, in jet technology has brought down the price to high quality low volume printing at home. The same will happen with 3D printers. Especially, if you think about all of the packing foam and other recycleable materials we throw away right now. It really would be the ultimate in recycling.
Now all we need to do is make sure that Linux can support them. I used to say that Linux developers should be focused on alternative human interface devices, I will now add alternative/new output devices. If we have support for them before anyone else does, that's yet another "killer app" for Linux. ;)
Re:The Home-Insudtrial Revolution? (Score:4, Informative)
The reason the AK-47 is the most common assault weapon in history is precisely that the design was made simple enough that they can be mass produced with very little in the way of machining experience. Forget printing, most of the parts in an AK-47 are stamped.
Re:He would need to invent transparent chocolate f (Score:2, Informative)
Isn't that aluminum oxide [designinsite.dk] commonly called alumina?
This guy also makes other stuff (Score:4, Informative)
Here's his first glasses prototype! [mit.edu] Welcome back to the eighties! ;)
Re:Like the idea of the eye test goggles (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The real cost of glasses? (Score:2, Informative)
Sometimes the lens themselves can be expensive if you have a weird prescription. There are also premiums charged for high-refractive lens (so you avoid the coke-bottle look), scratch resistance, tinting, etc.. These can add $200 to the cost of the lens depending on the store. Actual cost is about $5-10 extra so again, there's a huge markup.
Patenting it IS "opening the IP up" (Score:5, Informative)
Not "opening the IP up" would be manufacturing a "black box" that creates eyeglasses that cannot be opened or studied in any way, at least not without the lawyers/hit squad coming after you. The inventor would still have exclusive control over the rights to manufacture it, but no other person would be able to study it in any way.
about $25 a pair in my area (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Companion Program for eyeware perscriptions (Score:5, Informative)
If what you propose were possible, it would be possible to fix the focus on an out-of-focus picture; after all, a camera with the focus set too close is exactly the same as a near-sighted person.
You could put a lens in front of the monitor to blur it optically in the right way so that the person with blurry vision would see clearly. Move same lens closer to patient, and it's their glasses. Obviously, we've had this technology for a LONG time...
It's possible that holographic displays, if they existed in the real world, could do this.
Re:The Home-Insudtrial Revolution? (Score:2, Informative)
But they rely on the properties of a liquid goo turning to a solid when hit with UV lased light.
The technology you describe is called stereolithography. It was one of the first ways to do rapid prototyping, but is a completely different process than the "3D printers." These things are essentially a laserjet filled with resin rather than ink. They spray the ink onto the developing model, where it hardens into a mostly solid object. Still subject to easy breakage, easy melting, etc, but completely free of the large vat of astonishingly toxic chemicals
Automatic eye testing (Score:5, Informative)
It's too bad the original article doesn't say anything about how he makes lenses.
The current trick in low-cost eyeglass distribution for the third world is simply to use a kit of low-cost preformed round plastic lenses. Basic eyeglasses have a spherical component, a cylindrical component, and an axis for the cylindrical component. The lenses are round, and can snap into the frames at different rotations, the number of different lenses needed goes down to a hundred or so. And the whole kit fits in a briefcase.
Re:Companion Program for eyeware perscriptions (Score:5, Informative)
You can deblur to some extent. However it is an ill-posed problem: Roughly speaking, in one dimension for simplicity, if you blur by a point spread function h(x), this is convolution of your original image f(x) to get a blurred image g(x):
g(x)=h(x)*f(x)
where "*" is convolution. If you take Fourier transforms, convolution becomes multiplication and
G(w)=H(w)F(w)
has zeros in the frequency domain and if you try to divide by H(w) to invert the blurring
F(w)=G(w)/H(w)
Then H(w_0)=0 for some frequency w_0 (actually many frequencies) and you are dividing by zero when computing F(w_0). This magnifies any non-blurring related noise or error in G(w) (which is always present) and you get garbage back. Practical deblurring schemes like Wiener filtering, Tikhonov regularization and total variation regularization effectively limit the component of the reconstructed F(w) at or near those frequencies. Thus some information is lost: you don't even try to get F(w_0) right. But the effect can still be quite good. Typically this results in a less blurry image with less sharp edges. I don't think you could do this sort of regularization with a lens, but I could be wrong.
Some pretty pictures and comparisons of various algorithms can be found at Deblurring [berkeley.edu]
Re:The Home-Insudtrial Revolution? (Score:3, Informative)
In any case, while the current round of technology isn't anywhere near being able to fabricate the parts for an AK-47, I can't say I'd be surprised if the technology reached this point during my lifetime...