I've been hearing good things about yet another MIT Media Lab
spin-out, PerfectSight Opticals, which comes out of work done at the
lab's "Camera Culture" group.
A group of four Media Lab researchers developed a plastic lens assembly (cost: $2) that can clip onto the front of a mobile phone. When a user looks through the lens at the mobile phone's screen, she sees a set of parallel lines. She presses keys on the phone to make the lines overlap, and in about two minutes, the phone displays the proper prescription data. (See the videos below.)
The project won a $5,000 award at last spring's MIT Ideas Competition, and a small team working to commercialize the technology also was chosen as a finalist for the MassChallenge start-up competition this summer. The team says that "uncorrected refractive errors" (near-sightedness and far-sightedness) affect about 600 million people, and are the second most common cause of blindness worldwide. As you might expect, the majority of those people live in less-developed countries, where there isn't a Lenscrafters on every corner, and where the lowest-tech equipment for diagnosing eye problems still costs around $100.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Figuring out your own eyeglass prescription? PerfectSight Opticals may soon have the app for that - Innovation Economy - Boston.com
Author: Scott Kirsner
