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: 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 billion 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 or bifocal lenses.

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

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leading up to presbyopia.

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As a newborn, you would have
been able to focus

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as close as six and a half centimeters,

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if you wished 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 affecting 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
necessarily 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

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is that you lose field of vision
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 in contact lenses
or LASIK surgeries,

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and it's called monovision.

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It works by 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

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the sharpest parts 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 leave us?

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We've come up with a lot of 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

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we'll want to take a look
at the anatomy 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

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to the point 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-shifted 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 trade-offs,

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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 desired distance.

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OK, great. 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 they should be focused to.

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What we need are glasses

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that, when you're looking far,
far objects are sharp,

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and when you look near,

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near objects come into focus
in your field of view,

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without you having to think about it.

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

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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 tell
what direction our eyes are focused in.

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Using two of these, we can
triangulate your gaze direction

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to get a focus estimate.

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Just in case though,
to increase reliability,

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we also added a distance sensor.

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The sensor 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
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,
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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To put it simply, 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 into 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,
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 outperforming
traditional forms of static correction.

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So it's only a matter of time.

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It's pretty 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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Thank you.

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(Applause)