Clearly a lot of thought and effort went into this, but for as much as I enjoy 3D printing myself and finding new uses for this technology, I really don’t think this makes much sense. It’s a solution in search of a problem, which is a trap one can easily fall into with 3D printing in particular.
The frame is by far the cheapest part of a pair of glasses, it needs to be durable (this one is not and can not be) and UV resistant (PLA isn’t - why not at least use a better filament?). The 1940s-looking design isn’t helping either, unless you want to cosplay as a cough Indiana Jones villain (I know it’s much older, as mentioned in the text, but that’s the association people are going to make). You’d think that a proof of concept like this would at least try and make use of the unique advantages inherent to 3D printing to come up with a design that isn’t possible or economically feasible with mass-produced glasses, but there’s none of that here - apart from the high degree of customization, but I would personally rather trust a professional to fit glasses to my head instead of winging it myself.
The 1910’s style (not 1940’s 🙂) is a matter of taste. If you don’t like it you don’t like it. But there are actual advantages to it:
The lenses are closer to your eyes, providing a huge viewing port with small lenses, limiting chromatic aberration with high index lenses, making lenses thinner with high Rx lenses and making smudges and dirt less visible.
The frames are narrower, making them less susceptible to damage.
But if the style puts you off, clearly that’s a personal preference.
As for your other points:
The frame is by far the cheapest part of a pair of glasses
Depends on the frames. Some are stupendously expensive.
it needs to be durable (this one is not and can not be)
How do you know? Have you tried them?
I wear them every day all the time. They’re perfectly durable.
UV resistant (PLA isn’t - why not at least use a better filament?).
My everyday glasses are printed out of PETG, which isn’t affected by UVs. My reading glasses - which stay indoors - are printed out of PLA.
But it doesn’t matter: if your PLA frames become brittle, no problem: print another set, mount the lenses and off you go. It takes 30 minutes at the most.
You’d think that a proof of concept like this would at least try and make use of the unique advantages inherent to 3D printing to come up with a design that isn’t possible or economically feasible with mass-produced glasses, but there’s none of that here
You totally miss the points of those 3D-printed glasses. They’re not a proof of concept and they’re not a way to save money on the frames.
What they provide is freedom from opticians. If you break your frames - assuming you didn’t damage the lenses obviously - you just print new ones and you resume your life in 30 minutes.
When you rely on an optician, you have to go there (without glasses obviously, good luck driving without glasses with high Rx lenses), order new glasses, often choose new frames because your old frames conveniently don’t exist anymore, or the same model is slightly different and your old lenses don’t fit them, then you have to wait for days or weeks for the glasses to arrive. And while you’re waiting, you have to live without glasses.
Not to mention of course, the frames may be cheap, but if you go to an optician to have new glasses made, more likely than not, you’ll need new lenses. That is NOT cheap.
My glasses make me independent from all that. I don’t need to wait for new glasses, and I don’t have to pay for new lenses if mine are still serviceable. If I sit on my glasses, I get up, fire up the printer, clean the prints a bit with fine grit sandpaper and/or acetone, mount the lense into the new frames, install the hinge pins, and before my wife is done cooking dinner, I have new glasses without ever leaving home for zero dollars.
That’s their appeal. Not the price or making 3D-printed everything for the hell of it.
That’s also why - as you noticed - I put a lof ot thought into them: I LIVE with them FOR REAL.
I would personally rather trust a professional to fit glasses to my head instead of winging it myself.
You are very wrong about that. The professional is valuable to measure your pupillary distance and vertical angle, and make sure the lenses sit where they should. But glasses that are meticulously customized by yourself to fit your own face are the best glasses you can get.
There’s nothing magical about fitting glasses to a person and opticians don’t really want to do the final fitting: it’s long, it’s not optical work per se and they’re rather send you on your way asap. When you do that yourself, your glasses will be as good as can be.
If you sat on your glasses, you probably would need new lenses anyway or do you have a second pair at home? Or does the round shape mean that you could just order it online because the shape is so simple?
If you sat on your glasses, you probably would need new lenses anyway
I have sat on my glasses many times and I don’t need new lenses each time. Lenses are way stronger than any frames. If you don’t scratch them - like if you sit on them with pants wearing keys in your back pocket - they’re good to go on replacement frames
do you have a second pair at home?
No. Just the ones.
Well, I have a pair of progressives with really expensive lenses (only one) and 2 pairs of cheap single-vision near glasses. But the one pair I need most - and care about the most - is the progressives.
Or does the round shape mean that you could just order it online because the shape is so simple?
Actually the shape isn’t that simple. It’s not a circle, it’s an ellipse.
But regardless, you can’t order lenses on plans, sadly. All lens cutters use edging machines that trace the contour of your frames and edge the lenses accordingly, because almost nobody orders lenses without frames. That’s why I supply a model for a 3D-printed template to supply to the lens manufacturer in my Github. If they took STL files, it wouldn’t be needed, but they don’t.
I have had glasses for a very long time and never broken a lens, but I have broken more than my fair share of frames. It takes a lot to break a lens, and plastic frames break pretty easily. The worst with lenses is scratches or chips (though chips are also rare for me), and some of that can be mitigated by cleaning with the right cloth. Not much can be done about drops or other accidents though
I’ve never broken my frames but I also never sat on them. One set of glasses had the same frame for nearly ten years now and I’ve only replaced the lenses due to scratches.
The only time I had an issue with lenses/frame breaking was when I had one of those “frameless frames” that are only connected to the glasses through a small point.
the frame is usually the most expensive part by a lot. if you go to any western optician chain (and many people don’t have access to anything but chain stores), you are getting your glasses from luxottica. they own basically all brands of frames and have made it their business to upsell frames as much as possible.
there is an old youtube video by the channel How To Make Everything that is worth watching about making your own glasses. the gimmick of the channel used to be that they would tally up the cost of producing, processing and shipping the raw material for everyday things to demonstrate the economy of scale, so they made a $600 BLT sandwich, an $8000 three-piece suit, and more things like that by producing everything themselves on the sites that the raw materials exist. but when they made eyeglasses, the cost for a new pair of glasses came out to basically the same as their homemade ones, partly due to the fact the materials involved in making glass and basic wood frames exists basically everywhere, but mostly due to the absolutely insane markup on frames by the single company that makes most of them.
Clearly a lot of thought and effort went into this, but for as much as I enjoy 3D printing myself and finding new uses for this technology, I really don’t think this makes much sense. It’s a solution in search of a problem, which is a trap one can easily fall into with 3D printing in particular.
The frame is by far the cheapest part of a pair of glasses, it needs to be durable (this one is not and can not be) and UV resistant (PLA isn’t - why not at least use a better filament?). The 1940s-looking design isn’t helping either, unless you want to cosplay as a cough Indiana Jones villain (I know it’s much older, as mentioned in the text, but that’s the association people are going to make). You’d think that a proof of concept like this would at least try and make use of the unique advantages inherent to 3D printing to come up with a design that isn’t possible or economically feasible with mass-produced glasses, but there’s none of that here - apart from the high degree of customization, but I would personally rather trust a professional to fit glasses to my head instead of winging it myself.
Where I live, glaswork is reimbursed by health insurance, the frame isn’t
The 1910’s style (not 1940’s 🙂) is a matter of taste. If you don’t like it you don’t like it. But there are actual advantages to it:
But if the style puts you off, clearly that’s a personal preference.
As for your other points:
Depends on the frames. Some are stupendously expensive.
How do you know? Have you tried them?
I wear them every day all the time. They’re perfectly durable.
My everyday glasses are printed out of PETG, which isn’t affected by UVs. My reading glasses - which stay indoors - are printed out of PLA.
But it doesn’t matter: if your PLA frames become brittle, no problem: print another set, mount the lenses and off you go. It takes 30 minutes at the most.
You totally miss the points of those 3D-printed glasses. They’re not a proof of concept and they’re not a way to save money on the frames.
What they provide is freedom from opticians. If you break your frames - assuming you didn’t damage the lenses obviously - you just print new ones and you resume your life in 30 minutes.
When you rely on an optician, you have to go there (without glasses obviously, good luck driving without glasses with high Rx lenses), order new glasses, often choose new frames because your old frames conveniently don’t exist anymore, or the same model is slightly different and your old lenses don’t fit them, then you have to wait for days or weeks for the glasses to arrive. And while you’re waiting, you have to live without glasses.
Not to mention of course, the frames may be cheap, but if you go to an optician to have new glasses made, more likely than not, you’ll need new lenses. That is NOT cheap.
My glasses make me independent from all that. I don’t need to wait for new glasses, and I don’t have to pay for new lenses if mine are still serviceable. If I sit on my glasses, I get up, fire up the printer, clean the prints a bit with fine grit sandpaper and/or acetone, mount the lense into the new frames, install the hinge pins, and before my wife is done cooking dinner, I have new glasses without ever leaving home for zero dollars.
That’s their appeal. Not the price or making 3D-printed everything for the hell of it.
That’s also why - as you noticed - I put a lof ot thought into them: I LIVE with them FOR REAL.
You are very wrong about that. The professional is valuable to measure your pupillary distance and vertical angle, and make sure the lenses sit where they should. But glasses that are meticulously customized by yourself to fit your own face are the best glasses you can get.
There’s nothing magical about fitting glasses to a person and opticians don’t really want to do the final fitting: it’s long, it’s not optical work per se and they’re rather send you on your way asap. When you do that yourself, your glasses will be as good as can be.
If you sat on your glasses, you probably would need new lenses anyway or do you have a second pair at home? Or does the round shape mean that you could just order it online because the shape is so simple?
I have sat on my glasses many times and I don’t need new lenses each time. Lenses are way stronger than any frames. If you don’t scratch them - like if you sit on them with pants wearing keys in your back pocket - they’re good to go on replacement frames
No. Just the ones.
Well, I have a pair of progressives with really expensive lenses (only one) and 2 pairs of cheap single-vision near glasses. But the one pair I need most - and care about the most - is the progressives.
Actually the shape isn’t that simple. It’s not a circle, it’s an ellipse.
But regardless, you can’t order lenses on plans, sadly. All lens cutters use edging machines that trace the contour of your frames and edge the lenses accordingly, because almost nobody orders lenses without frames. That’s why I supply a model for a 3D-printed template to supply to the lens manufacturer in my Github. If they took STL files, it wouldn’t be needed, but they don’t.
Thanks for taking your time to answer my questions!
My pleasure 🙂
I have had glasses for a very long time and never broken a lens, but I have broken more than my fair share of frames. It takes a lot to break a lens, and plastic frames break pretty easily. The worst with lenses is scratches or chips (though chips are also rare for me), and some of that can be mitigated by cleaning with the right cloth. Not much can be done about drops or other accidents though
I’ve never broken my frames but I also never sat on them. One set of glasses had the same frame for nearly ten years now and I’ve only replaced the lenses due to scratches. The only time I had an issue with lenses/frame breaking was when I had one of those “frameless frames” that are only connected to the glasses through a small point.
I lean towards metal frames, so have not had issues in a while, but the couple times I’ve had plastic frames I have had breakage or warping.
the frame is usually the most expensive part by a lot. if you go to any western optician chain (and many people don’t have access to anything but chain stores), you are getting your glasses from luxottica. they own basically all brands of frames and have made it their business to upsell frames as much as possible.
there is an old youtube video by the channel How To Make Everything that is worth watching about making your own glasses. the gimmick of the channel used to be that they would tally up the cost of producing, processing and shipping the raw material for everyday things to demonstrate the economy of scale, so they made a $600 BLT sandwich, an $8000 three-piece suit, and more things like that by producing everything themselves on the sites that the raw materials exist. but when they made eyeglasses, the cost for a new pair of glasses came out to basically the same as their homemade ones, partly due to the fact the materials involved in making glass and basic wood frames exists basically everywhere, but mostly due to the absolutely insane markup on frames by the single company that makes most of them.