Lee von Kraus is nearsighted, but he doesn’t like glasses and finds contacts difficult to wear. Instead, he decided to get to the root of the problem: the inability of his eyes’ lenses to flatten when looking at faraway objects. The result is simultaneously one of the most elegant and ridiculously overcomplicated solutions we’ve seen yet. Using a motor from a portable CD player and a control circuit taped to his hand, von Kraus created “Squintasaurus,” a pulley system that would stretch the skin of his eyelid back when he needed to focus, pulling the eye lens flat.
Squintasaurus will stretch your nearsighted eyes into shape
A homemade project stretches the skin of the eyelid back to flatten the eye’s lens, fixing some nearsightedness.
A homemade project stretches the skin of the eyelid back to flatten the eye’s lens, fixing some nearsightedness.
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
For what it’s worth, I’m nearsighted, and pulling back the skin at the corner of my eyelid did give me a bit more clarity, although I found it disorienting and not nearly as good as my glasses-corrected vision. We’re not sure that, as von Kraus suggests, a “professionally made, miniaturized version of such a device” would gain widespread traction, but it’s an interesting form of vision correction, even if this version makes you look like an extra from Johnny Mnemonic. For more work by von Kraus, you can check out his website here.
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