Finnish startup IXI enhances glasses with real-time autofocus lenses

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Finnish startup IXI is working on a pair of smart “autofocus” glasses that look like regular specs but dynamically tweak your prescription in real time, using eye‑tracking sensors and liquid‑crystal lenses to sharpen whatever you’re actually looking at.

Instead of carving the lens into fixed zones like bifocals or varifocals, IXI’s approach continuously adjusts a larger close-up “reading” area and can effectively make that segment disappear when you’re focused on distant objects, giving you the full lens for long‑range vision again.

Accordig to CNN, the company is pitching this as the next big leap after varifocals, which still force wearers to tilt and hunt for the right sweet spot and often introduce annoying peripheral distortion and adaptation headaches.

The glasses pack photodiodes and LEDs that bounce infrared light off your eyes to track where you’re looking, then use that data to drive the liquid crystal section of the lens, changing focus on the fly.

There are trade-offs: you’ll need to charge them overnight via a hidden magnetic port, and IXI says there will still be a “blend” region at the edge of the active lens area where things are less than perfect, plus more validation is needed before they’re cleared as safe for driving.

If the electronics fail, a failsafe drops the lenses back to a standard prescription, usually set up for distance, instead of leaving you blind behind a dead smart gadget.

IXI has raised over $40 million and plans to launch the glasses in the high-end segment within the next year, starting in Europe before chasing FDA clearance for the US, with only a few frame shapes at first but multiple widths.

Other players, including Japanese companies Elcyo and ViXion, are also experimenting with liquid‑crystal autofocus eyewear, though existing products tend to look more like lab gear than everyday glasses.

IXI’s CEO likens this moment to the arrival of autofocus in cameras and expects that in a decade or so, fixed-focus lenses may feel as dated as manual‑focus point‑and‑shoots.

Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com.