Apple may have discovered a novel solution to the VR industry’s prescription lens issue: liquid lenses.
Glasses and VR headsets typically don’t get along. The solutions employed by headset designers are a mixed bag because they frequently sit too close to your face for glasses to fit in front of your eyes. Some, like the Oculus Quest 2, package in optional spacers that make room for specs, while others, like the Apple Vision Pro, include a prescription lens attachment (but you need to buy lenses for it at an additional cost), and a few do nothing at all.
As a result, some glasses wearers believe that VR is inaccessible to them.
According to the US patent issued (via Apple Insider), Apple has developed a design for a “electronic device with liquid lenses.” The article describes a “head-mounted device” (which sounds like a virtual reality headset) with “tunable liquid lenses.” For more information, see the patent, but the TL;DR is that electronic signals given to the lenses will cause the liquid inside of them to deform, changing the lenses’ refractive index.
This should make it possible for the liquid lenses to treat a variety of vision problems without the use of any additional equipment. Additionally, the eye-tracking component of the headset calibrates the correction.
A “pair of glasses” is another object that could be covered by Apple’s patent. Although we shouldn’t infer too much from patent phrasing, this could be a hint at the Apple AR glasses that the company is reportedly also working on.
When will liquid lenses be available?
Although the concept is theoretically possible, adding liquid lenses to a headset that is already on the market might not be the best idea, either in terms of cost or design. Apple may also come up with an alternative fix for VR’s prescription issue.
Instead, it appears much more likely that liquid lenses would debut in the third-generation model (if we see them at all) in about five years, giving Apple plenty of time to perfect the design.