Eyeball / lens upgrade possibilities?

Awhile back Amal posted this possible fix for eyeglass wearers…

It seemed to be perpetually two years away. I’m very nearsighted, and have gotten old enough that I really ought to have bi-focals, but I refuse to. I started to look into this to see if it had gotten any closer to reality when I found lots of actual ongoing lens replacement surgery. For ex.

So I guess I’m asking is this an actual implementation of the original idea? Did it somehow sneak past testing into reality? Cause this seems like an awesome idea to me.

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At 47, I am really struggling lately with Presbyopia (lack of being able to focus close as you age). I had LASIK maybe 15 years ago for nearsightedness, and now I’m the opposite. I cant see jack shit up close. Being on a computer pretty much all waking hours probably made it worse. I had bought off the shelf reading glasses and while they worked, I hated them because the constant putting them on and taking them off. I would do something up close then look up and my normally good vision was blurry becasue I was still looking through the glasses.

Then whenever I wore then for anything more than a minute, my eyesight was decidedly worse after I took them off, like my eyes were trying to compensate. So I went to the eye doctor and got my a pair of top of the line progressives that had readers at the bottom and nothing at the top as my far sight is 20/20. Those turned out to be the biggest waste of money. Absolutely hated them. There was like 2 sq mm of area you could look through that would be in focus for a given focal depth. Nothing else would be in focus so all your peripheral vision was blurry and you had to move your head if you wanted to see anything. I think I wore them like 3 times.

I thought maybe some regular bifocals would do the trick… I got some off the shelf glasses with reader bifocals, and 0 power everything else. They are ok, but now I find myself staring at the ceiling when I’m on the computer trying to see out of the bottom of the glasses. To make matters worse, I have monitors stacked on top of each other. Once I put them on, I can’t take them off because I’ve been wearing them for a minute or two and won’t be able to see anything. It’s a snowball effect.

I had heard the tail end of a conversation regarding lens replacement so I followed up with the person. Found out the conversation was about cataracts but the info about the lenses was interesting.

I had cataract surgery. This is to replace the lense when it clouds over due to cataracts. The right eye was first, the left eye had to wait a year because it was not bad enough to warrant the surgery.
Now to your question: I had three lense choices. First, was a single focus lens, covered by Medicare, which would require reading glasses or possibly progressive lenses. Second choice was a lens that is made to warp using the normal muscles that focus your eyes, so the brain does not know anything has changed. This is the option I chose, for $1200 additional per eye. These focus from 17 inches out to infinity. They are usable down to a few inches on large objects, but for really fine detail I use a magnifier headband. It is weird to remember that if the print is fuzzy, shine more light on it and push it away to the 17 inch mark. Third choice was a version of #2 that would focus down to a few inches, at a yet higher cost. I had a low level of astigmatism, but I paid for the use of Laser cutting ( $1500 ) so they did a little Lasik to correct the astigmatism.
My wife is up for cataract surgery in a couple of weeks, and they now have a fourth option. This lense has “legs” that keep it from rotating, so they can correct astigmatism in the lense.

Right now I’m willing to pay a lot of money to fix this. I do far too much close up work and I’m going to run out of room on my screen if I make the windows font any bigger.

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