People have five senses: “sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch” complement each other, and generally people have a more complete sense of things after integrating these five kinds of information, but I really want to say which one is the most important, I think it should be the vision, because about 80% of the information in our life comes from the vision.
80% of the information in life comes from the visual (picture from the Internet)
However, with the increase of people’s work pressure and daily poor eye habits, the situation of vision reduction is everywhere, in this case, it is usually necessary to add a pair of “pendant” to the “window of the soul” – glasses. Now if you look around, you will see a high proportion of people wearing glasses. In addition, even people with normal vision may occasionally wear casual glasses such as sunglasses and ski goggles, so it can be said that glasses play a heavy or light role in everyone’s life.
As a member of the “pendant” army, my glasses are fitted in the general store, the process is the common selection of frames + optician selection lenses, the advantage is cheap, fast delivery, the disadvantage is limited comfort, wear for a long time will feel tired, because everyone’s face shape, as well as eye distance, eye width, nose shape, nose height, ear shape, head diameter and so on are unique, Conventional frames are mass produced, can not be truly perfect for themselves, if it is a special face shape, or high myopia, the right glasses are more difficult to find, in addition, there is no way to add personalized elements of mass-produced glasses. So if you have the budget, have spare glasses, or have glasses ordered in advance, custom glasses are a better option.
So how do custom glasses work? How many steps does it take if you want a customised pair of glasses?
Traditional hand-made custom glasses are more done in Japan and Europe, and less done in China, which is more famous like LYYBROS. Pure manual customization process includes: one-to-one private design, data measurement, determine the design scheme, handmade frame, try on delivery, etc., the processing cycle is 6-10 weeks, and the price ranges from thousands of yuan to tens of thousands of dollars.
Hand-made glasses (photo from the Internet)
Now we can also use 3D printing technology to produce customized eyeglass frames, usually there are two options: light curing technology (SLA/DLP) print photosensitive resin material frames, this type of frame surface smooth, transparent texture, the details of the shape can be more refined.
Light cured resin spectacle frame
Or we can also use nylon powder materials, the use of selective laser sintering (SLS) technology to print molding, so that the production of frames with good toughness, light weight, and better temperature resistance and anti-aging properties, is currently one of the most common technologies for customized glasses applications.
SLS 3D printed spectacle frames
For consumers, you can find a brand that specializes in customized 3D printed glasses, or go directly to the relevant brand franchise store to customize. Generally, there are several types of styles in these stores for us to choose, each type has its own unique style, after entering the store, you only need to try on and choose your favorite style, and then you can start to do data collection, and now usually use three-dimensional scanning technology to obtain the data of the face and head, the scanning process does not exceed 30 seconds to 1 minute.
Face scan camera module
After the scan, then it is the part of optometry and lens selection, which is no different from the traditional way. After lens selection, the offline process is basically over, and we can go back and wait patiently for the delivery of glasses. The whole process is transferred to the design and production end, the engineer will import our data in the professional software, design the frame model with the good style we choose as the template, and also add the personalized elements such as the text pattern we want on the frame according to the actual configuration.
After the design of the model, the 3D printing stage is entered, because the glasses are products with fine structure and curved surface, and also have the characteristics of assembly holes, printing should be small lamination, light weight, but also have good strength and durability, so as to meet the requirements of daily use, so this puts forward higher requirements for printing materials and printing equipment. After process testing, JSAdd 3D uses the general PA12 material Precimid1172Pro when printing spectacle frames, and its comprehensive performance is excellent, especially compared with PC, TR and other materials, using the material to print the frame weight is lighter, only about 5 grams, and the entire frame does not exceed 10 grams. In addition, in the selection of printing equipment, decided to use P360 model, the molding size of the machine can meet the requirements of mass production, but also has flexible characteristics, in the use of 0.08mm thin layer thick printing, but also has excellent stability, very suitable for the production of customized spectacle frames.
3D printed one-piece frame
After printing is complete, the frame is usually polished to make the frame smoother. In addition, in order to further improve the toughness, surface smoothness, and water resistance of the frame after grinding, and make it easier to dye, the frame can also be smoothed by chemical steam.
SLS 3D printing frame in grinding
Then we can dye the frame to give a variety of colors, and then dry it before entering the final assembly step.
By installing components such as hinges, screws, support blades, and polished lenses on the frame, a pair of customized 3D printed glasses is complete and can be sent directly to us via logistics!
In general, the advantages of customized 3D printing glasses compared with traditional mass production are very obvious, but the limitations at this stage are also obvious:
1- The price is high, the store price of a pair of frames is about 750 RMB to 1500 RMB;
2- The delivery cycle is long, from order to delivery time is about 5-10 days, not suitable for urgent glasses customer groups. However, as the production and marketing processes become more and more clear, there is still a lot of room for compression in the price and delivery cycle of customized 3D printed glasses, which will become the choice of most people in the future.
If you have a large number of glasses models that need to be printed, let’s try JSADD 3D‘s 3D printing technology！
Contributor: Alisa/Lili Lu/Seazon