Amid the torrent of products announced earlier in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, like giant televisions and absurdly expensive GPUs, it's easy to miss less fun but potentially life-changing products. Soliddd Corp., a company with a less-than-serious-sounding name, has developed smart glasses that can restore vision to those suffering from Macular degeneration.
Macular degeneration is an age-related retina disease that causes vision loss in the center of the eye. This makes it impossible for people to see things right in front of them while leaving peripheral vision intact. Soliddd's SolidddVision smart glasses use an array of lenses, similar to the compound eyes of flies, to project multiple images onto the retina simultaneously.
The brain then merges all the images to create a full-field image. Soliddd conducted a clinical study of 30 patients with macular-related vision problems and claims that many patients experienced an improvement in their reading ability of 50% or more.
According to Soliddd's press release, one of the SolidddVision alpha testers said, "My eyesight is so bad that I'm unable to do something as simple as read. "I'm nearly blind, but when I looked through the Soliddd device, I could clearly see a picture of Taylor Swift and, best of all, read some text. This is truly a life-changing invention for me and others like me."
Allison Sheridan checked out the tech for her Nosillacast podcast at CES and got a first-hand experience of the brain taking 64 separate images and creating a unified image. Soliddd did not have a pair of glasses; only a single display taped to a board was available, which doesn't inspire confidence that this is a fully developed product.
The company expects to release a finished product at an unspecified time in 2025. No pricing was announced.
Previously: Ray Ban's Meta glasses