Monday, October 14, 2013 THE NEW MEXICAN
TECH
A-7
GAME REVIEW
Technology adds new dimension to prescription eyeglasses A scene from Beyond: Two Souls. SONY/THE AP
‘Beyond: Two Souls’ lacks spirit By Lou Kesten
The Associated Press
Optometrist Robert Shapiro, right, examines Hilda Lozano at Family Eyecare on Oct.3 in Los Angeles. About 64 percent of Americans wear glasses to improve vision. Companies are now designing a host of solutions to help, including futuristic lenses and even an iPhone application that developers say can help people wean themselves off glasses. PHOTOS BY GARY FRIEDMAN/LOS ANGELES TIMES
High-tech specs
By Andrea Chang
Los Angeles Times
G
oogle Glass has been hogging the spotlight when it comes to eyewear, but get ready to see new technology designed for those stuck with oldfashioned prescription eyeglasses. About 64 percent of Americans wear glasses to improve vision. Many can’t stand them, complaining that glasses are cumbersome, headache-inducing or don’t work in all situations. Meanwhile, the growing amount of time people spend in front of computers and mobile devices also has raised concern about the potential damaging effects on eyesight. That’s spurring innovation among eye specialists, who say the glasses industry has been largely stagnant since bifocals were invented by Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century. “It’s a marketplace with slow technology adoption. There hasn’t been new technology in eyeglasses in forever,” said Stephen Kurtin, chairman of Superfocus, which makes adjustable-focus glasses that enable wearers to choose the best focus for every distance. Now companies are designing a host of solutions to aid glasses wearers, including futuristic lenses and even an iPhone application that developers say can help people wean themselves off glasses. One area of focus has been on reducing eyestrain for people who spend several hours a day staring at computers, tablets and smartphones. Many optometrists believe the light emitted from such devices could damage a viewer’s eyesight over time, although that hasn’t been conclusively proven. Still, lens companies are rolling out a slew of new lenses that they say will help ward off those potentially harmful effects. “Why would you take the risk? Let the science unfold and let us protect ourselves as it’s unfolding,” said Don Oakley, president of VSP Optics Group, which this year introduced its Unity with BluTech lenses at 30,000 eye doctor offices in the U.S. BluTech lenses are infused with melanin, a natural pigment found in the iris of the eye, to help filter out high-energy blue light and UVA/UVB radiation while allowing what Oakley called “innocuous” light to pass through. The melanin gives BluTech lenses a yellowish hue and is available for any prescription. Other companies produce lenses with blue-light filtering coatings. Oakley said BluTech lenses reduce eyestrain and fatigue from long hours spent in front of the computer. Adding BluTech lenses to a pair of glasses is typically less than $100; they can be worn indoors and outdoors and can also be added to nonprescription glasses.
A pair of glasses fitted with BluTech lenses. The lenses are infused with melanin, a natural pigment found in the iris of the eye, to help filter out high-energy blue light and UVA/UVB radiation.
He cautioned that BluTech “doesn’t prevent anything per se, but it protects.” Although many eye doctors think all that time staring at your smartphone is bad for your eyes, one firm is encouraging people to use mobile devices to improve their vision. GlassesOff Inc. is gearing up to launch an iPhone app this year that it claims can enhance near-vision sharpness. The New York company contends that human vision is based on two main factors: the quality of an image captured by the eyes and the imageprocessing capabilities of the brain as it interprets the image. By spending 12 to 15 minutes a day, three times a week for three months completing a game-like program, GlassesOff says, a user can improve the image-processing function by teaching the brain to better interpret blurred images. The app is tailored for each individual and adapts according to his or her progress; the goal is to wean a viewer off reading glasses altogether. “It’s relevant to practically any person that I know,” said Nimrod Madar, chief executive of GlassesOff. “We can empower people to self-improve their vision condition, so you’re no longer depending on external intermediates.” The notion that people can improve their eyesight through eye exercises has drawn skepticism from some optometrists and ophthalmologists. But in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists behind GlassesOff said participants in a study at the
In the past few years, one of the new lens technologies that has gained the most traction is adjustable-focus eyeglasses. The glasses are intended for people afflicted by presbyopia, an aging condition that affects the eye’s ability to focus on close objects, and are made by a handful of companies.
University of California-Berkeley showed a nearly 10-year improvement in eye age. That enabled them to be able to see more than two lines lower on an eye chart and achieve normal or near-normal visual performance. That was the case for Sharon Hayat, 46, who had depended on low-strength reading glasses to see small text. She was approached by GlassesOff to be a participant in an early trial this summer, an offer she accepted despite being “very skeptical, very dubious.” “It’s kind of like a video game that you play,” the homemaker from Skokie, Ill., said. “There are these little dots that flash and these little stripes and I was like, ‘This is not going to do anything.’ ” But by the end of the program, she said, she had no trouble reading newspapers and menus without her reading glasses. She was even able to reduce the text size on her Kindle e-reader. “Just this week, I had my son’s cough medicine and I didn’t need anything to read the label,” Hayat said. “I hate to sound like a commercial, but it really did work.” In the past few years, one of the new lens technologies that has gained the most traction is adjustable-focus eyeglasses. The glasses are intended for people afflicted by presbyopia, an aging condition that affects the eye’s ability to focus on close objects, and are made by a handful of companies, including Van Nuys, Calif., company Superfocus and Britain’s Adlens. Superfocus’ adjustable-focus glasses feature fluid-filled lenses and a slider on the nose bridge. Users can manually adjust their lenses by moving the slider to the desired position, which changes the focus of the lens and eliminates the need to switch between multiple pairs of glasses or the use of bifocals or progressives. Since being introduced to the commercial market four years ago, Superfocus has sold several thousand pairs nationwide, said Kurtin, the company’s chairman. The lenses took years to develop because it was “technologically so difficult,” he said. “You want to make a lens that has all the commercial attributes, yet change shape, yet be optically perfect.”
David Cage doesn’t care if you have fun The lead designer of Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy has loftier goals for his video games. He wants them to make you feel something, and not just the adrenaline rush you might get from blasting hordes of alien invaders. He wants to make you sad, or nervous, or compassionate, or desperate. It’s all about the emotional response. By that yardstick, Cage’s Beyond: Two Souls (Sony, for the PlayStation 3, $59.99) is a success. Granted, the emotion it evokes is often frustration — with both Cage and his stubborn, self-pitying protagonist. Her name is Jodie Holmes, and she’s the proverbial Girl With Something Extra — namely, a disembodied entity named Aiden whose existence is somehow tethered to Jodie’s. No one can see Aiden, but he can hover around a room, flicking switches, knocking over vases and pulling off other cheap parlor tricks. Get Aiden angry, though, and he’ll choke out any punks who give our heroine a hard time. And occasionally he can even possess another human and commit the kind of acts that Jodie herself can’t stomach. We first meet Jodie as a desperate 20-something on the run from government forces. Beyond then skips around her entire life story, all the way back to her birth. We see her as a confused child and as a surly teen. We see her undergoing boot camp as a CIA recruit. We see her lost and homeless, trying to work up the nerve to commit suicide. All these vignettes eventually snap together to form a portrait of a woman tormented by her mysterious connection to the “Infraworld.” Ultimately, though, Jodie’s single-minded angst makes her tiresome. We never get to see her enjoy her bizarre powers or show any curiosity about Aiden’s world; instead, she’s a passive guinea pig manipulated by men with their own devious agendas. This is no slight against Ellen Page, a good actress who provides Jodie’s image, via motion-capture technology and voice. Likewise, Willem Dafoe and Kadeem Hardison deliver sympathetic performances as the lab geeks who monitor Jodie’s maturation. But they’re all let down by Cage’s script — in Page’s case by monotony and in Dafoe’s case by a preposterous late-game character U-turn. The story isn’t helped by its non-chronological presentation. I get what Cage is trying to achieve with this approach, mixing the more action-heavy sequences from Jodie’s adulthood with more emotional moments from her youth. But I just didn’t find Jodie’s childhood traumas plausible or compelling and would have preferred a more conventional narrative that showed the gradual development of her talents. I’m a fan of David Cage, and I admire his storytelling ambitions. But as the video-game audience matures, we’re seeing more sophisticated narratives all over, from low-budget indies like Gone Home to best-selling blockbusters like The Last of Us. Beyond: Two Souls is hackneyed in comparison, a promising tale that gets bogged down in thriller cliches. Two stars out of four.
On the Web u playstation.beyond-twosouls.com
Firm creates smart fire alarm Nest, having shown off what it can do by making the thermostat a little smarter, is now taking on a second home appliance for a modern makeover: the smoke detector. The firm announced its new project last week to coincide with Fire Prevention Week, showing off a device that detects smoke, heat and carbon monoxide levels. The Nest Protect also boasts features that are meant to take some of the annoyance out of that sometimes pesky fire alarm. “We’ve all experienced the smoke alarm going off while we’re cooking or searched for the source of that incessant low-battery chirp in the middle of the night,” said Nest’s founder and chief executive, Tony Faddell, in a statement. “Every time a smoke alarm cries wolf, we trust it a little less, and then — in a moment of frustration — we rip the batteries out to stop the beeping. And that leaves us and our families at risk.” Nest, citing the National Fire Protection Agency, said that 73 percent of smoke alarms that have failed to activate during home fires had dead, missing or disconnected batteries. In most cases, homeowners reported they had disconnected the detectors because of false “nuisance” alarms. To take care of that particular problem, Nest said, users will be able to turn off a false alarm by simply waving at the smoke detector. Users will also be able to get location-based “heads-up” alerts from the alarm — something like, “there’s smoke in the kitchen” — so they’ll know exactly what the Nest Protect is sensing, and where. For U.S. customers, these spoken alerts are available in English and Spanish. Similar to the way the Nest Thermostat works, users can integrate their Nest Protect with their smartphone or tablet so they can monitor the detector’s battery life and other key metrics from outside the house. The Washington Post