07 May Meet AVA the future of lenses

For all of my 25 year career as an optometrist one thing has remained the same.: the refraction process.  Your refraction is the whole “which is clearer 1 or 2” part of the eye examination process.  In essence this amounts to the optometrist asking the patient for directions to the lens that lets them see the best.  For over 100 years this the limit on how close we could get to that lens came down to a quarter of a dioptre (a unit describing the power of an optical lens).  For years patients have asked me “has anything changed in this part of your job?” and the answer was always some variant on “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Well technology has finally come for the refraction process!  It comes in the form of this high tech little marvel:

Meet the VR800.

This is a truly remarkable piece of kit.  Rather than hundreds of individual lenses being contained within it, this has only 2!  But these are no ordinary lenses.  These exclusive liquid filled lenses have their curvatures controlled by small electric motors and can become any prescription we require down to an accuracy of 0.01 dioptres.  So they are 25x more accurate than a standard lens.  This is important because the vast majority of the population can discern changes in vision of less than the standard 0.25D we have used for a century.  If you think about it, this is a bit like ordering an Uber home and having the driver drop you off when he gets to your street rather than taking you right to your door.

The other amazing thing is that lens manufacture long ago became accurate enough to make lenses down to these minute power variances.  The handbrake on this revolution has been the machine used to determine the prescription.  Once we have the super accurate prescription we are able to recreate it in glasses using Essilor’s Advanced Visual Accuracy (AVA) lenses.  These are available in progressive, occupational and single vision lenses.

We are very excited to be able to offer this technology to our patients and are proud that we are only the 3rd practice in New Zealand to have the VR800.  Its great to see such a degree of innovation in our industry and we hope there is more to come.