Eyeglasses with adaptive focus

"It's great to see our new concept materialize and be validated after all these years of continuous efforts," said Bernard Kippelen. Kippelen, who helped start the project when he was at the UA, is now a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech.

"People don't often recognize that university scientists make prototypes," Peyghambarin said. "People think of us as just generating science papers. But when we actually make something like this, in house, people begin to realize we have real expertise that's applicable to everyday problems."

In addition to Li and Peyghambarian, UA optical scientists who collaborated in the research are David L. Mathine, Pouria Valley, Pekka Ayras, M. S. Giridhar, Gregory Williby, James Schwiegerling (who also is on the faculty in UA's department of ophthalmology and vision sciences), Gerald R. Meredith, and Seppo Honkanen. Bernard Kippelen and Joshua N. Haddock of the Georgia Institute Technology also collaborated.