On behalf of my son, I requested the smart glasses that ‘give sight to the blind’

Our 4-year-old son was born with a very rare pituitary brain tumor known as a craniopharyngioma. When discovered at 10 months old, the tumor was crushing his optic nerves and suffocating his pituitary gland. This meant a lack of normal hormone function that controls basic body functions such as thirst, growth, cortisol production and thyroid function – as well as a loss of vision.

Our world came crashing down around us as we tried to imagine the steps forward, and more importantly, his future. It was not a malignant cancer and rarely resulted in loss of life. But when it comes to quality of life, we’ve heard enough horror stories to keep us up at night.

But don’t worry – I promised a story about hope, and this is what it is.

My first thoughts when I saw the company’s presentation in my inbox were of my family – my mother with AMD (Age-Related Macular Degeneration) and also my son, who experienced vision loss from his brain tumor.

So here I was, wading through the sea of ​​people in Eureka Park, the Wild West of CES, trying to find a tiny booth for a startup that bore the odd name, Soliddd. The company was there showing a prototype of its smart glasses, known as Soliddd Vision, a piece of technology that aims to restore sight to people with low vision conditions, including macular degeneration. The claim is great: think of it as hearing aids for your eyes. Or, according to ambitious CEO Neal Weinstock, “giving sight to the blind.”

As a child, poor vision is what affects our son’s daily life the most. Despite being tumor-free since his miraculous surgery in 2023, he still needs daily supplemental hormone replacements and experiences poor vision in one eye. You’d never know it from his attitude to life, but he’s been blinking out of one eye for four hours a day for most of his life, and his lack of vision affects many of the child’s daily activities, such as playing hide and seek or ability. to see a plane in the sky.

But again, hope.

I tried on a pair of subtle prototype glasses. At this stage, they felt less like a pair of glasses and more like a small headset. However, the technology behind them has the potential to be completely revolutionary. The frames have two cameras that point to capture the world and two that point to calibrate your eye movement.

The image feed from the external cameras is then projected onto the microscreen on the lens – but not just once. The lens actually has a series of screens on it, all displaying the same image. What the company’s founder and CEO discovered was that the eye could be tricked into merging this set of high-resolution images together into a single image.

Weinstock is an engineer experienced in 3D work, and the early prototypes of Soliddd Vision were actually an example of autostereoscopy, or glasses-free 3D. But after working with Rich Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, he realized it had an application for restoring vision.

“What the brain makes of these multiple images is something that people in computer science see better than ophthalmologists,” Weinstock told me. “First, ophthalmologists think that the resolution in these distant areas of the eye is so low compared to the fovea. But everyone knows that your iPhone or Samsung phone is stitching together multiple images from separate cameras and building better sharpness in terms of a person’s vision. That’s what the brain does.”

Phone manufacturers had actually unwittingly imitated the workings of the brain, and now this understanding is being created in reverse. By creating an array of Maxwellian displays, also known as retinal projection displays, Soliddd can direct a pinhole light through the eye’s natural lens without involving the focusing mechanism, Weinstock explained.

The brain does what it always does – it takes the vision from your left eye and your right eye and adds them together to create the single sharpest image. With Soliddd Vision, the brain is taking this set of images from the lens and projecting them onto the entire retina – and self-selecting to create a perfectly focused image.

“We split the content coming from the cameras into a series of identical images, which pass through the lens and deliver to the eye in perfect focus—right on the retina,” Soliddd president Derek Myers explained to me. . “Those optic nerves are then able to read it and construct a single image – in perfect focus. Hence the elimination of areas of the eye that are degenerative.”

Although putting the glasses on itself didn’t immediately give me perfect vision, I could see what he was saying. Looking through the prism of the screens and after some minor adjustments, I was really seeing them as a single image. And with that, a glimmer of hope.