Viewpoint: False dawns

Innovation in optics means there’s a constant stream of ideas for higher levels of clinical care and new products to improve the everyday lives of patients. But some of these ideas and concepts outrival others and some simply try to fix problems that don’t exist. We’ve seen our fair share of eyebrow raising ideas over the past decade, but these are our personal favourites.

It’s easy to say with the benefit of nearly a decade’s worth of hindsight, but Google’s Glass smart device concept was never going to work as a mainstream optical appliance; it wasn’t even designed with a lens. It was a grey, single piece bar with an integrated nose bridge and a whopping battery pack and projector on the right-side temple; aesthetically pleasing, it wasn’t. Even Luxottica former chairman and founder Leonardo Del Vecchio, whose company had signed a deal with Google at the time, said it wasn’t the sort of thing he would ‘wear to the disco.’ Quite.