Many of us with less-than-perfect vision fantasize about waking up one morning able to see perfectly. Wish no more: There are contact lenses that claim to shape the lens of your eye while you sleep, eventually giving nearsighted people perfect vision (a remedy that’s significantly less sci-fi than a telescope implanted in the eye).
Nearsightedness occurs when the eye focuses light in front of the membrane at the back of the eye called the retina, instead of on it, usually due to an elongated eyeball. The eyeglasses or contacts that combat this condition work by diverging incoming light, which is then converged by the wearer’s eye.
The corrective contacts, called i-GO Overnight Vision Correction, reportedly work by gently reshaping your eye’s lens. A columnist in The Guardian wrote about his experience trying them out:
I begin with a sight test, then [optician Kieran] Minshull takes a topography of my eye, photographing the curvature of my cornea to obtain the measurements needed to make the lenses….
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Last night DiscoBlog traipsed down to the fairly swanky headquarters of giant advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, where the British-based ad folks recognized 10 “world-changing ideas”—inventions to improve people’s lives in one way or another.
The winner among the finalists was the LifeStraw, a foot-long filtering tube that purports to let you (or your friends in the developing world) drink even the filthiest, most microbe-infested water without getting sick. We’re not sure what the criteria were for winning this award—the LifeStraw isn’t exactly new, having been named a Best Invention of the Year by Time in 2005—but it seems a legitimately great item. Wiley event attendees insist they knew it would win because it fit in with what Saatchi chose in the past.
Whereas LifeStraw may indeed be the most world-changing “idea” at the event, it did not have the most compelling presentation. (Perhaps it was handicapped in this regard by the fact that the plentiful Saatchi-provided wine seemed to be downright hygienic.)
Some other finalists’ presentations were both more future-looking and more exciting for the short-attention-spanned blogger in all of us.
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