Like many 4-year-olds, there’s nothing my son loves more than cars. Despite my own complete lack of interest in the topic, he can already identify make and model of cars from across the street with uncanny accuracy, spurred on by his growing collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels.
But as we’ve had to explain to him, we still don’t know if he’ll be ever to drive one himself. The brain tumor that he was born with left him with stunted vision, particularly in one eye, with little hope of improvement.
That’s why one startup’s CES pitch this year promising a pair of prototype smart glasses that could grant “sight for blind people” caught me off guard. Determined to see if it could really be true, I had a new agenda for my week in Las Vegas; to attempt to reinvigorate my own belief that tech advancements are still capable of transforming lives — and rediscover hope for my son’s future.
A hopeful prototype
Our 4-year old son was born with a very rare pituitary brain tumor, known as a craniopharyngioma. When it was discovered at 10 months old, the tumor was pressing up against his optic nerves and choking his pituitary gland. That meant a lack of normal hormone function that controls basic bodily functions like thirst, growth, cortisol production, and thyroid function — as well as a loss of vision.
Our world crashed around us as we attempted to envision the steps ahead, and more importantly, his future. It wasn’t a malignant cancer, and it rarely resulted in loss of life. But in terms of quality of life, we’d heard enough horror stories to keep us up at night.
But don’t worry — I promised a story about hope, and that’s what this is.
My first thoughts upon seeing the company’s pitch in my inbox were of my own family — my mother with AMD (Age-related Macular Degeneration) and also my son, who experienced loss of vision from his brain tumor.
So, there I was, wading through the sea of people in Eureka Park, the Wild West of CES, attempting to find a small booth for a startup that went by the strange name, Soliddd. The company was there showing off its prototype smart glasses, known as Soliddd Vision, a piece of technology that aims to recover sight to people with low-vision conditions, including macular degeneration. The claim is huge: think of it like hearing aids for your eyes. Or, according to its ambitious CEO, Neal Weinstock, “giving sight to the blind.”
As a kid, it’s poor vision that affects our son’s daily life most. Despite being tumor-free since his miraculous surgery in 2023, he still requires daily supplementary hormone replacements and experiences poor vision in one of his eyes. You’d never know it from his attitude on life, but he’s been patching one eye for four hours a day for most of his life, and lack of vision affects lots of daily kid activities, like playing hide-and-seek or being able to spot an airplane in the sky.
But again, hope.
I tried on the delicate pair of prototype glasses. At this stage, they felt less like a pair of glasses and more like a small headset. The technology behind them, though, has the potential to be downright revolutionary. The frames have two cameras pointing out to capture the world and two pointing in to calibrate to the movement of your eyes.
The feed from the exterior cameras image is then projected into the micro display on the lens — but not just once. The lens actually has an array of displays on it, all showing the same image. What the founder and CEO of the company discovered was that the eye could be tricked into piecing this array of high-resolution images together into a single image.
Weinstock is an engineer with a background in 3D work, and the early prototypes of the Soliddd Vision were actually an example of autostereoscopic, or glasses-free 3D. But after working with Rich Muller, a physicist at University of California, Berkeley, he came upon the realization that there was an application for restoring vision.
“What the brain makes of these multiple images is something that people in computer science grok better than ophthalmologists,” Weinstock told me. “First of all, the ophthalmologists think that the resolution in these far regions of the eye is so low compared to the fovea. But everyone knows that your iPhone or Samsung phone are putting together multiple images from separate cameras and constructing better acuity in terms of a person’s vision. That’s what the brain does.”
The technology allows the brain to do with vision what it’s always done.
Phone manufacturers had actually unknowingly mimicked the operation of the brain, and now that understanding is being reverse-engineered. By creating an array of Maxwellian displays, also known as retina-projection displays, Soliddd can aim a pinhole light through the natural lens of the eye without engaging the focusing mechanism, as Weinstock explained.
The brain does what it’s always done — take the vision from your left eye and your right eye and add them together to create the single clearest image. With Soliddd Vision, the brain is taking this array of images from the lens and projecting them to the entirety of the retina — and self-selecting to create a perfectly in-focus image.
“We divide the content coming in from the cameras into an array of all the same image, which goes through the lens and delivers to the eye in perfect focus — directly to the retina,” the chairman of Soliddd, Derek Myers, explained to me. “Those optic nerves are then capable of reading that and constructing a single image — in perfect focus. Therefore eliminating the areas of the eye that are degenerative.”
Although wearing the glasses myself didn’t immediately give me perfect vision, I could see what he was saying. Peering through the prism of screens, and after a couple of small adjustments, I was, indeed, seeing them as a single image. And with that, a spark of hope.
Early tests are promising
Soliddd says it’s already working with early patients with conditions such as AMD (Age-related Macular Degeneration) and even coronary dystrophy, which can affect much younger people. One early patient is just 19, and after using the prototype glasses, reported fully restored central vision.
The form factor is important, of course, which Soliddd admitted. After all, if a pair of glasses was inconvenient, uncomfortable, or socially obtrusive, people would be far less likely to adopt them into their daily lives. Soliddd says it will be benefitting from all the advancements happening in the wider industry around compact form factors, which remains one of the biggest hurdles to adoption of smart glasses. We’ve all seen the success of glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and much of that has to do with form factor.
I was shown renderings of what the company expects the consumer version of this product to look like, though, and they certainly seemed promising.
Watch this simulation of how SolidddVision glasses corrects vision for macular degeneration. pic.twitter.com/HOoq7DhsHg
— Soliddd Corp. (@SolidddCorp) December 23, 2024
The company is considering the entire product package too, including the resolution and image quality — as well as ergonomics, privacy, and security concerns. All things that matter quite a bit when you’re augmenting one’s vision.
Perhaps even more exciting, though, Myers explained that future updates to the product could include a more fine-tuned solution for the specific mapping of a patient’s individual retina. This could be important for someone like our son, who lacks peripheral vision on one side of his eye.
As he explained these things, I couldn’t help but think of my son — perhaps in his teens or 20s — and what his life would be like. Don’t get me wrong — on the other side of his surgery, I have so much hope and optimism for his future. And yet, what would technology in its infancy today would be fully matured in 10 or 20 years? It’d be disingenuous not to hope, especially since we’ve benefitted so much from advances in technology that aided in his own treatment.
His brain surgery, which was successfully completed entirely through his nasal cavity, used advanced technology and techniques that never would have been possible a few decades ago. That’s because of endoscope cameras and tiny instruments, yes. But the first time the surgery had been done on a child of his age was only four years earlier by the same surgeon, who used a 3D-printed skull and virtual reality to ensure the surgery could be completed.
In our son’s case, the result was a clean resection of the tumor with as minimal an impact as possible. On one hand — a tried-and-true miracle. On the other, more proof that advances in technology really do matter.
A not-so-distant future
Soliddd is currently fundraising, but it already has plans to put out a consumer product in the near future, as early as the first quarter of next year.
But let me clear: As of now, I don’t know for sure that something like Soliddd could help my son’s vision. He may have damage to his actual optic nerves from the tumor, which is wholly different from retinal deterioration. Furthermore, this first version of smart glasses may only have a few hours of battery life, designed for limited, at-home use.
But visual deficits that could benefit from such glasses run deep in my family. My mother has AMD, and my nephew may have some form of retinal damage as well. AMD is thought to be a generic condition that can be passed down generation to generation. Who knows — it may even be something I have to experience at some point, and is certainly therefore possible to pass on to our children.
As I’ve seen in my mother’s own battle with AMD, there’s no easy cure for the disease.
As I described my son’s condition to another Soliddd representative, he gave me a knowing grin.
“I can’t tell you how many people have said that coming through here. You do the business conversation, and then it’s my mom, my dad, my uncle, my grandpa.”
As I’ve seen in my mother’s own battle with AMD, there’s no easy cure for the disease. It tends to progress over time, and the best treatments we have now can only hope to slow the deterioration of the retina. Technology like Soliddd provides an alternative solution. But for me, it’s less that Soliddd’s specific solution is the end-all-be-all. It’s that CES and the tech world at large are full of ideas just like this. A smart walking cane with GPS and AI built into it for the blind, advanced smart hearing aids, and even an at-home AI stethoscope.
I’m not one to bank all my hope for the future in technological progress, but I walked away from CES this year dropping the skepticism and reigniting my sense of optimism about the potentially life-changing technology that is currently in development — and could be just a few years away.
Maybe someday, it could even mean that our son gets to live his dream of driving a car. I have more hope today than ever.
