Digital Lens Designs
The future of lens design and advanced, customized lenses starts with a “click”
Digital Technologies: changing the way we do business
It’s a fact: advancements of the digital age have changed the way we do business. From mobile applications that manage our schedules and book our travel, to how we conduct meetings and share information – digital technologies have spread to every corner of our workplaces and changed the way we do business.
Email communication changed the game
61% of working internet users said email was “very important” to doing their job.1
New technologies = more revenue
Digital transformation is expected to boost the bottom line of companies by +50% over the next 5 years. 2
The impact of digital technologies
86% of CEOs believe it is crucial to champion digital technologies. 3
A New Age In Custom Lenses
Digital innovations, from our smartphones to our computers, have made us more productive, more efficient and more precise. The same is true for lenses.
Digital Lens designs can deliver a customized experience instead of the more common lenses that are created with fixed designs. At VISION EASE, we use advanced digital technology to deliver custom lenses that provide a clearer, more accurate visual experience – from edge to edge. With VISION EASE digital designs, you can create custom lenses that are optimized to meet your customer’s specific measurements, lifestyle needs and frame choice.
The Keyword is Digital
Using single point diamond turning and a propriety digital design system, exact surface heights are cut at thousands of points on the lens back surface. Precise mathematical equations create a cutting path on the lens that combines the prescription and the progressive design together into VISION EASE Progressive Digital Designs. Unlike fixed front surface progressives, where one design is used to fit all patients, digital lenses can be produced with custom features designed in the lens when lenses are made to order in the lab.
Fixed vs. Digital?
For the past 40 years or so, progressives have been delivered with the design molded on the front of the lens. And, while they have gone through many improvements and optimizations, these lenses may still have unwanted blur and magnification issues. Digital Lens technologies produce better results in prescription lenses by creating a customized design for each patient. No two patients are the exactly the same, so neither should their eyeglass lenses.
In a fixed lens, the manufacturer molds the progressive add onto the front surface at the factory. This is referred to as a semi-finished progressive lens blank. An optical laboratory then grinds and polishes the back surface with spherical curves for the prescription. Digital Progressive Lenses starts as a molded semi-finished single vision lens blank. When cutting the back surface, the laboratory’s computer determines the correct combination of complex curves that produce the prescription as a progressive, all on the same surface. In addition, other calculations can be done to re-design the lens’ periphery with the designer’s understanding of lens pantoscopic tilt, wrap angle and vertex distance. A fixed, front surface lens design has preset characteristics like viewing zone sizes and corridor lengths that are the same for all patients, only the prescription powers vary. They’re not designed for individual needs. Digital back surface lenses can be optimized at the time of production based on specific customer measurements, lifestyle needs, the frame they chose and the way that the frame holds the lenses in front of their eyes.
When a fixed design is worn at different tilts, wrap angles and distances from the eye, the effective power of the lens for most prescriptions changes a small amount. However, the power in the periphery changes more – and therefore changes the way the lens works for the wearer. Try it. If you wear glasses, tilt them up and down; move them out and in – the power you see changes even though the prescription of the lens doesn’t. That helps to explain one reason why different people have different experiences with the same fixed design progressive lens, even when they have virtually the same prescription. A fixed lens is more of a general-purpose compromise – it requires the customer to learn to use the lens, mostly because of new zone sizes and blur in the periphery.
Digitally enhanced lenses deliver the prescription at lens center and across the periphery more precisely taking tilt, wrap and vertex into account. The result is a lens that is more adjusted to the wearer’s actual prescription for clear vision all over the lens. So, there’s very little needed to “learn to use” the new lens. It’s like HD TV. Every customer understands the precision that digital delivers when viewing an HD image on an HD TV or how crisp the colors and images are on so many of the new digital tablets and cameras. The TV picture on an older analog TV is flatter and less vibrant.
VISION EASE Digital Lens Designs
Learn more about our unique digital lens designs
