Mr. Mastrangelo, who’s a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Utah developed innovative smart glasses, which were displayed at CES last month, are made of liquid lenses that automatically focus on whatever the wearer is looking.
This is how the smart glasses work: a distance sensor in the bridge of the glasses uses infrared light to calculate the distance between the glasses and an object. The sensor then tells “actuators” to reshape how the liquid lenses are curved.
The curvature of a lens controls the focal length. This happens naturally in the eyes as well. Normally when you’re young, the lenses of your eyes are flexible, so they change their curvature easily, allowing you to focus on objects far away and up close.
Changing how the liquid lenses are curved allows the smart glasses to focus on whatever the wearer is looking at. It takes about 14 milliseconds for the glasses to change focus, and the rechargeable battery in the frames lasts more than 24 hours, Mastrangelo says.
“The response was phenomenal,” Mastrangelo says of CES. Research on the smart glasses was published this week in the journal Optics Express.
