While some of the world’s biggest tech companies including Meta, Google and (reportedly) Apple are eyeing the future of smart glasses, startups are working on a significant innovation for the other kind of eyeglasses—the regular kind, worn by billions across the world.
One of those startups, Finland-based IXI Eyewear, has raised more than $40 million from investors, including Amazon, to build glasses with adaptive lenses that could dynamically autofocus based on where the person wearing them is looking.
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In late 2025, the company said it had developed a glasses prototype that weighs just 22 grams. It includes embedded sensors aimed at the wearer’s eyes and liquid crystal lenses that respond accordingly. According to the company, the autofocus is “powered by technology hidden within the frame that tracks eye movements and adjusts focus instantly — whether you’re looking near or far.”
By contrast, smart glasses like Meta’s Ray-Bans and Ray-Bay Displays, as well as Xreal and Google’s Project Aura, are leaning into cameras that look out at the world around the user and AI-powered features such as facial recognition, language translation and recording photos and video. Lenses tend to be a secondary consideration.
IXI told CNN in a story published on Tuesday that it expects to launch its glasses within the next year. It has a waitlist for the glasses on its website, but has not said in what regions they’ll be available.
There’s a lot of engineering work that goes into IXI’s autofocus glasses.
While the goal is to make these glasses an improvement on traditional bifocals and progressive lenses, the IXI glasses likely won’t be a fully seamless experience.
“The center part is the sharp area, and then there is the edge where the liquid crystal stops and which is not that great to look into, but the center area is large enough that you can use that for reading,” CEO Niko Eiden told CNN. “So, we do have our own distortions that we’re introducing, but the majority of the time, they will not be visible.”
The IXI glasses won’t be cheap. “We will be in the really high end of existing eyewear,” Eiden said.
A representative for IXI didn’t immediately respond to CNET’s request for additional comment.
This type of technology is also being pursued by Japanese startups Elcyo and Vixion. Vixion already has a product with adaptive lenses embedded in the middle of the lenses (they do not resemble standard glasses).
The challenges of making autofocus glasses
The benefits of autofocus lenses could start with wearers eliminating the need for multiple pairs of glasses, such as bifocals and progressives, and culminate in a more natural viewing experience.
But perfecting that option presents a variety of challenges, said Meenal Agarwal, an optometrist and podcaster who leads Dr. Meenal Agarwal & Associates in Pickering, Ontario.
“The engineering has to be reliable to have lenses shift focus fast, accurately, and invisibly without any lag or blurring,” she said. “Battery life and power might (make it difficult) to keep the glasses lightweight and powered all day. Packing optics, sensors, and computing into frames that look and feel like normal glasses is likely a challenge, not to mention medical and regulatory approvals.”
What IXI and other companies are pursuing may seem revolutionary to those who are reading this story through the bottom half of their glasses lenses now. But Agarwal says the idea is not entirely new.
“There have been research prototypes like Stanford’s autofocal glasses,” she said. “There have also been other startup efforts and optical research into adaptive lenses and autofocus eyewear. But none have consumer-ready, lightweight glasses in the market yet.”
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