Smart glasses are increasingly being pushed as the future of personal computing. But so far, an overwhelming majority have focused on aspects like social media sharing, pulling up AI agents, or media consumption. Soliddd wants to push smart glasses into a challenging niche of medical science.
At CES 2025, the New York City-based company introduced SolidddVision smart glasses. Soliddd claims these are “the first true vision correction for people living with vision loss due to macular degeneration.” Notably, these glasses won’t require any FDA clearance and will enter the market later this year.
Macular degeneration is an age-related condition that prevents people from seeing what’s directly in their line of sight, blocking their central vision due to degeneration of the macular region of the retina.
Millions of people across the world suffer from dry and wet macular degeneration. Unfortunately, there’s no cure for it, though, there are some drugs that can sometimes improve the vision, or simply arrest the damage.
“We can provide sight in areas of the visual field where patients otherwise see nothing,” Neal Weinstock, founding chief of Soliddd, said in the announcement. Results from a clinical study involving the SolidddVision glasses have also yielded a positive outlook.
The SolidddVision smart glasses take a leaf out of the VR playbook to allow sight restoration for people living with macular degeneration. Inspired by a fly’s eye, these smart glasses employ a proprietary lens array that pushes multiple images to the retinal zone that is still healthy.
The trick here is to let the brain construct “a single full-field image with good acuity that feels like normal, in-focus sight.” The whole system is a combined effort of patented optical design and software, beaming in-focus views courtesy of a parallel-ray light field.
There are two front-facing cameras to capture the world outside, and an equal number of inward-facing cameras for mapping the eyes and gaze tracking. The software combines the input video with eye mapping data, performs spatial adjustments, employs the necessary color correction, and beams the final view to the internal display units.
The SolidddVision glasses are currently in the beta-testing phase, but the company is eying a market launch in 2025. So far, the SolidddVision glasses appear to be the most practically rewarding implementation of this wearable form factor, and it would be interesting to see where the technology leads.