Apple may have found a wild solution to VR’s prescription lens problem; liquid lenses.
VR headsets and glasses don’t usually go well together. Often they sit too close to your face for glasses to fit your eyes, and the solutions used by headset designers are a mixed bag – some pack with optional spacers that make room for specs like the Oculus Quest 2 , while others have a prescription lens mount (but you have to buy lenses for them at an extra cost) like the Apple Vision Pro, and a few don’t do anything at all.
This has led some glasses wearers to feel that VR isn’t accessible to them, but that could change if Apple’s latest patent lands on one of its headsets.
According to the patent granted in the US (through Apple insider) Apple has created a design for a “liquid lens electronic device”. The document describes a “head-mounted device” (sounds like a VR headset) with “tunable fluid lenses.” You can read the patent for the full details, but the TL; DR is that electronic signals sent to the lenses will distort the fluid in them and change the refractive index of the lenses.
This should allow the liquid lenses to correct a wide variety of vision problems without the need for accessories. In addition, the correction is calibrated by the eye-tracking system of the headset.
Apple’s patent also states that it could apply to “glasses.” We can’t read too much into patent formulations, but this could indicate the Apple AR glasses that Apple apparently also has in development.
When do we get liquid lenses?
As with all patents, we should note that there’s no guarantee we’ll ever see these liquid lenses appear in an actual headset – one made by Apple or not. While the design exists in theory, it may not be practical to add liquid lenses to a commercially available headset – either from a design or cost perspective. Alternatively, Apple could develop another solution to VR’s recipe problem.
Plus, even if liquid lenses appear in an Apple headset that you or I could pull off the shelf, there’s no telling when that will happen.
It’s probably impossible for the first-gen Vision Pro to launch in early 2024, and we’d be surprised if it showed up in the second-gen headset rumored to launch sometime in the next few years. Instead, it seems much more likely that we’ll see liquid lenses in the third-gen model in about half a decade (assuming we see them at all), as this would give Apple plenty of time to hone the design.