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Free Engraving Available With Apple Vision Pro ZEISS Lens Inserts
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I’m curious. I need a fairly strong prescription for my glasses; I tried contacts for the first time a few years ago and was told I was “2-3 levels under max.” Anyone have issues getting lenses where you were denied because your prescription lenses were too strong?
This is a very good point--even for people in one-user households, or where they're the only person who wears glasses, your eyes are pretty much guaranteed to change over time, so unless you plan to just throw out the old inserts when you need new ones, it's useful to have a label of which set is which.
That said, it's also a lot less likely that you'll break the inserts than glasses, so there's also less reason to keep the old set around as a slightly-blurry backup like people do with glasses.
Go to the page Zeiss has set up for this exact purpose and enter your prescription, it'll tell you if it's supported. It's a little annoying that Apple's link to that page is buried two layers deep in support documents on medical issues.
If you try it, report back for the rest of us--they will reject anything with prism outright, but if you don't have any prism I'm curious if there's levels of extreme nearsightedness that they won't make inserts for.
Just punching some numbers in as an experiment, they'll accept up to -10.25 SPH or -4.5 CYL alone, but if you have both there's some equation that limits how much of the two can be combined (I assume due to how much glass is necessary to meet that). For example, if you had -10.0 SPH you can't get more than -1.5 CYL, but if you have -5.0 SPH you can get up to -3.75 CYL.
An aside: I had been wondering what percentage of users were locked out of Vision Pro due to lack of prism support; turns out that Zeiss has a footnote on that very page with the info I wanted: "PRISM refers to a rare type of correction occurring in less than 5% of eyeglass prescriptions in the USA*. *Manufacturer data for more than 6 million US eyeglass prescriptions analyzed." Since about 64% of US adults wear glasses (another 12% use contacts), that implies that a bit over 3% of US adults have a prescription with prism. Which I'd call "uncommon" but far from rare--if at least one person in the waiting room at the DMV has a condition, it's not "rare".
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Just tried, looks like they support me. No plan on buying a Vision Pro but good to know I at least have an option.
Zeiss can't make my inserts.
For me, the problem is my right eye.
My right eye is:
Sph Cyl Axis
-7.5 -6.5 015
My left eye is:
Sph Cyl Axis
-6.0 -3.0 160
I entered my left eye prescription as both eyes and there was not problem, but once i entered my right eye, boom, doesn't work.
My hope is that 3rd parties will make inserts. I bought some inserts from honsvr for my PS VR 2 and they work great. I'm hoping that the reason that Zeiss is not making my prescription is because it's rare (and there for not cost effective to have a bunch of blanks), not that the Vision Pro messes up with high astigmatism.
For me, the problem is my right eye.
My right eye is:
Sph Cyl Axis
-7.5 -6.5 015
My left eye is:
Sph Cyl Axis
-6.0 -3.0 160
I entered my left eye prescription as both eyes and there was not problem, but once i entered my right eye, boom, doesn't work.
My hope is that 3rd parties will make inserts. I bought some inserts from honsvr for my PS VR 2 and they work great. I'm hoping that the reason that Zeiss is not making my prescription is because it's rare (and there for not cost effective to have a bunch of blanks), not that the Vision Pro messes up with high astigmatism.
Absolutely, but you're probably going to want to keep the next-most-recent one just in case.
You and me both, albeit for different reasons. Interesting thought on the 3rd party lenses, though, and certainly possible.
That said, I'm skeptical we'll see 3rd party ones any time in the foreseeable future. As far as I know, a "regular" VR headset just requires lenses that will let your eyes focus on screens a fixed distance away, and make those screens appear farther away than they are. The precise eye tracking that the Vision Pro requires to function makes me think that making lenses for it that will work well will involve more complex/sensitive optics.
Assuming Zeiss signed an exclusive deal with Apple, which seems likely, the only way to figure that out will be reverse-engineering the Zeiss lenses, extending that to more extreme vision correction, and doing a bunch of testing with a headset to make sure that your optics keep the eye tracking working properly, which is a lot of work for a small market.
If version 2 (or 3 or whatever) has much higher volumes, that addressable market might become large enough to make the effort profitable, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Caveat: Some sketchy overseas company might well crank out cheap inserts that aren't tested and don't actually work well (or at all).