British inventor Josh Silver, a former professor of physics at Oxford University, has come up with a game-changer of a product design with his water-lensed glasses.

Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device's tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.

The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.

You can mass-produce millions of these, rather than manufacturing myriad individual lenses each tuned to a user's specific vision deficiencies. And while the one-size-fits-all mentality may not fly in developed nations, Silver's goal is to help the hundreds of millions of people in developing countries who suffer from poor eyesight.

Silver calls his flash of insight a "tremendous glimpse of the obvious"--namely that opticians weren't necessary to provide glasses. This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is 1:1,000,000.

The implications of bringing glasses within the reach of poor communities are enormous, says the scientist. Literacy rates improve hugely, fishermen are able to mend their nets, women to weave clothing. During an early field trial, funded by the British government, in Ghana, Silver met a man called Henry Adjei-Mensah, whose sight had deteriorated with age, as all human sight does, and who had been forced to retire as a tailor because he could no longer see to thread the needle of his sewing machine. "So he retires. He was about 35. He could have worked for at least another 20 years. We put these specs on him, and he smiled, and threaded his needle, and sped up with this sewing machine. He can work now. He can see."

So far 30,000 of Silver's specs have been distributed, but more are on the way; his eventual target is 100 million pairs.

via the guardian

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Currently most people buy their prescription glasses from their local opticians, but over the next few years more and more people will start buying their glasses online and here are the top 5 reasons shopping for glasses online is better.

1. Convenience - People live much busier lives than at any other time in history, and many of us just don't have the time to go look at glasses during the day when the stores are open. Buying your prescription glasses over the internet allows you to shop 24 hours a day 7 days a week and holidays. Unfortunately most shops are not open at 2am, but websites have the advantage of never closing

2. Cost - let's say I want to open a prescription eyeglasses store; the first thing I am going to need to do is find a location for my store. This store is going to cost me money for rent, then I need to hire staff, this is more expenses, then I have to pay for electricity, water and rubbish removal. So before I even buy my stock I am paying thousands of pounds a month. But I can save myself on rent, rubbish removal, electricity and sales staff. By doing this I can charge you less then my land based competitors and still make the same if not more of a profit, and because the internet is worldwide I am not limited to selling my glasses to people in my immediate area like a local store would be, I can offer my products to people in need of prescription eyeglasses and fashionable frames all over the globe.

3. Service - In a store the staff is considered sales staff. It is their job to make sales, and they may even get a commission on each sale they make. In an online store they have no sales people. The only people would ever need to talk to would be customer service and their job is to help you with any problems of questions, but they are not trying to make a sale or get you to buy expensive additions that you do not need. The information they provide is aimed at helping you and not at getting you to spend more money.

4. Selection - since they do not need to rent a store for their online prescription glasses shop they don't have to worry about not having enough room to display as many different types of glasses as they want. This allows them to offer you more selections and styles, such as aviator frames for example, without having to pay for a bigger showroom. All they need to do is place pictures of the different glasses on their website at no extra cost and this allows them to offer you bigger selections and lower prices.

5. Price - I know I mentioned that online glasses are less expensive, but I want to make it clear that by buying your glasses online you can save up to 70% on your prescription glasses. This is significantly less then what you will pay in any store. As a matter of fact you can get 2 pairs and it will still be cheaper than a regular store.

As I said there are many reasons to switch to buying your glasses online, and once you have shopped online and seen how stress free and convenient it really is you will never want to walk into a regular store again.