An Idea for Purveyors Of Eyeglasses
August 16th, 2008Yesterday I found myself frustrated by my physical inability to select new glasses. The problem is that my prescription is rather strong (-5.75 diopters in each eye) and when I try on a a pair of frames with fake lenses I am unable to see what I look like in a mirror. In order to see anything I had to move to within a few inches of a mirror which distorted my perspective of how the frames looked on my face. I did this over and over again with dozens of frames. I eventually submitted and selected a frame.
Did I end up putting way too much faith in the salesperson’s opinion of how the frames looked? Should I have brought along a helper to select my frames? Should I have just worn contacts and avoided this problem? Did I buy lady’s frames?
I think there’s a simple way to modify this process and I’m hoping some eyeglasses store has done or will do the following:
- buy a Mac with an iSight camera
- start PhotoBooth
- let customers take potential glasses to the Mac and collect photos of themselves trying on frames
- review photos while wearing your old glasses
I think this process would be beneficial even if your vision is good enough to see yourself in the mirror. It’s nice to be able to quickly compare different frames in succession without having a pile of frames in front of you and swapping back and forth between frames.
There is also an opportunity to build a piece of software that would be a bit more specific than PhotoBooth and allow notes to be associated with photos (such as the model of the frame) and to organize photos by customer. I’ll put this idea on my list of software that seems interesting but will never be built.
Next time I buy glasses I think I’ll take along my laptop.