WEBVTT

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Every single one of us will lose,

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or has already lost something
we rely on every single day.

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I am of course talking about our keys.

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(Laughter)

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Just kidding.

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What I actually want to talk about
is one of our most important senses:

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vision.

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Every single day we each lose
a little bit of our ability

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to refocus our eyes

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until we can't refocus at all.

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We call this condition presbyopia,

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and it affects two billion
people worldwide.

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That's right, I said billion.

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If you haven't heard of presbyopia,

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and you're wondering, "Where are
these two billon people?"

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here's a hint before
I get into the details.

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It's the reason why people
wear reading glasses

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or bifocal lenses.

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I'll get started by describing the loss
of refocusing ability

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leading up to presbyopia.

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As a newborn,

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you would have been able to focus
as lose as six-and-a-half centimenters

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if you wish to.

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By your mid-20s, you have about
half of that focusing power left.

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10 centimeters or so,

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but close enough that you never
notice the difference.

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By your late-40s though,

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the closest you can focus
is about 25 centimeters,

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maybe even farther.

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Losses in focusing ability
beyond this point

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start effecting near-vision
tasks like reading,

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and by the time you reach age 60,

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nothing within a meter
radius of you is clear.

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Right now some of you
are probably thinking,

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that sounds bad but he means you
in a figurative sense,

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only for the people that actually
end up with presbyopia.

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But no, when I say you, I literally mean
that every single one of you

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will someday be presbyopic
if you aren't already.

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That sounds a bit troubling.

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I want to remind you that presbyopia
has been with us for all of human history

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and we've done a lot of different
things to try and fix it.

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So to start, let's imagine
that you're sitting at a desk reading.

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If you were presbyopic,

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it might look a little
something like this.

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Anything close by,
like the magazine, will be blurry.

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Moving on to solutions.

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First, reading glasses.

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These have lenses
with a single focal power

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tuned so that near objects
come into focus.

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But far objects necessary go out of focus,

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meaning you have to constantly
switch back and forth

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between wearing and not wearing them.

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To solve this problem,

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Benjamin Franklin invented
what he called "double spectacles."

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Today we call those bifocals,

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and what they let him do was see
far when he looked up

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and see near when he looked down.

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Today we also have progressive lenses
which get rid of the line

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by smoothly varying the focal power
from top to bottom.

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The downside to both of these
is that you lose field of vision

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at any given distance

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because it gets split up
from top to bottom like this.

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To see why that's a problem,

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imagine that you're climbing
down a ladder or stairs.

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You look down to get
your footing but it's blurry.

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Why would it be blurry?

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Well, you look down, and that's
the near part of the lens,

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but the next step was past arm's reach,

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which for your eyes, counts as far.

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The next solution I want to point out
is a little less common

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but comes up a lot in contact lenses
or Lasik surgeries,

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and it's called monovision.

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And it works but setting up
the dominant eye to focus far

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and the other eye to focus near.

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Your brain does the work of intelligently
putting together the sharpest parts

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from each eye's view,

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but the two eyes see slightly
different things,

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and that makes it harder
to judge distances binocularly.

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So where does that all leave us?

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It seems like we've come up with
a lot of different solutions

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but none of them quite restore
natural refocusing.

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None of them let you
just look at something

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and expect it to be in focus.

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But why?

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Well, to explain that, we'll want
to take a look at the anatomy

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of the human eye.

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The part of the eye that allows us
to refocus to different distances

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is called the crystalline lens.

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There are muscles surrounding the lens
that can deform it into different shapes,

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which in turn changes its focusing power.

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What happens when someone
becomes presbyopic?

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It turns out that the crystalline
lens stiffens to the point

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that it doesn't really change
shape anymore.

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Now, thinking back
on all the solutions I listed earlier,

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we can see that they all have something
in common with the others

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but not with our eyes,

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and that is that they're all static.

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It's like the optical equivalent
of a pirate with a peg leg.

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What is the optical equivalent
of a modern prosthetic leg?

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The last several decades have seen
the creation and rapid development

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of what are called "focus-tunable lenses."

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There are several different types.

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Mechanically-shifting Alvarez lenses,

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deformable liquid lenses

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and electronically-switched, 
liquid-crystal lenses.

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Now these have their own tradeoffs,

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but what they don't skimp on
is the visual experience.

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Full field-of-view vision that can be
sharp at any desirable distance.

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OK, great.

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The lenses we need already exist;

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problem solved, right?

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Not so fast.

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Focus-tunable lenses add a bit
of complexity to the equation.

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The lenses don't have any way
of knowing what distance

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they should be focused to.

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What we really need are glasses
that, when you're looking far,

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far objects are sharp,

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and when you're looking near,

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near objects come into focus

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anywhere in your field of view
and without you having to think about it.

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What I've worked on these last
few years at Stamford

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is building that exact intelligence
around the lenses.

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Our prototype borrows technology
from virtual and augmented reality systems

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to estimate focusing distance.

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We have an eye tracker that can help tell
what direction our eyes are focused in.

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Using two of these,

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we can directly triangulate
your gaze direction

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to get a focus estimate.

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Just in case though,

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to increase reliability we also added
a distance censor.

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The censor is a camera that looks
out at the world

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and reports distances to objects.

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We can again use your gaze direction
to get a distance estimate

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for a second time.

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We then fuse those two distance estimates

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and update the focus-tunable
lens power accordingly.

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The next step for us was of course
to test our device on actual people.

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So we recruited about 100 presbyopes
and had them test our device

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while we measured their performance.

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What we saw convinced us right then
that autofocals were the future.

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Our participants could see more clearly,

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they could focus more quickly

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and they thought it was an easier
and better focusing experience

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than their current correction.

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Put it simply:

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when it comes to vision,

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autofocals don't compromise
like static corrections in use today do.

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But I don't want to get ahead of myself.

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There's a lot of work for my colleagues
and me left to do.

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For example, our glasses are a bit --

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(Laughter)

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bulky, maybe?

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And one reason for this is that we used
bulkier components

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that are often intended
for research use or industrial use.

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Another is that we need to strap
everything down

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because current eye-tracking algorithms
don't have the robustness that we need.

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So moving forward,

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as we move from a research
setting to a start-up,

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we plan to make future autofocals

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eventually look a little bit more
like normal glasses.

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For this to happen,

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we'll need to significantly improve

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the robustness
of our eye-tracking solution.

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We'll also need to incorporate smaller
and more efficient electronics and lenses.

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That said, even with
our current prototype,

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we've shown that today's
focus-tunable lens technology

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is capable of out-performing
traditional forms of static correction.

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So it's only a matter of time.

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It's clear that in the near future,

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instead of worrying about which pair
of glasses to use and when,

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we'll be able to just focus
on the important things.

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(Applause)

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Thank you.

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(Applause)