What is the SHAW™ Lens?
The SHAW™ lens is a specially-made lens that is designed specifically to cater to your individual vision needs. It is an iteration of a digital lens and, unlike conventional eyewear lenses, are highly custom-made to compensate for aberrations in your vision, the most prominent being aniseikonia.
What is the difference between a traditional and a digital lens?
A traditional lens is crafted using pre-existing tools that polish a prescription into a lens. Since the tool is designed for the prescription at hand and not the other way around, this means that there are limits to how well your prescription suits your vision needs; it's closer to finding a shoe size that fits you, even if it's not quite the shape that's best for you.
A digital lens takes this beyond conventional polishing methods and aims to craft a lens that not only comes in your prescription, but accounts for a variety of common causes of sub-optimal viewing. It is most noticeable in patients who have a multi-focal prescription and want to use progressive lenses. Progressives typically come with a catch: while it takes away the visible line of a bifocal and gives you greater flexibility over your distance, mid-distance, and close-up / reading vision, progressive lenses often come with distortion in your periphery, where your vision gets distorted because of the design of the progressive.
A digital progressive lens can be customized in a few ways, primarily by lessening the effects of distortion, but also through preference such as increasing your reading area, for avid readers; increasing your mid-distance area, for the computer-savvy; and other options that help make your progressives feel unique. This doesn't stop here, however.
The SHAW™ Lens and Aniseikonia
Aniseikonia is a specific vision aberration that is characterized by both eyes seeing the same image at two different sizes, causing a kind of double vision that the brain tries to work to fuse together into a single image. Aniseikonia is actually semi-common, as the effect can be produced not just by a side effect of cataracts or certain ocular surgeries, but also by different prescriptions in each eye. While there are various manifestations of it, a common variant can be described as feeling as though the images are superimposed on one another; if you were reading, for example, it would look as though there are two sets of letters, one behind the other.
The SHAW™ lens helps eliminate this effect through a patent-pending digital lens system that takes in all of the information a digital lens normally accounts for, and combines it with the truly detailed nuances of glasses: the distance from your eye to the lens, the way your pupils are aligned in your glasses, how your eye looks through the center compared to the sides, the tilt of your glasses, and even the way your frame wraps around your head. All of this information is then used to model a digital lens through the SHAW™ lens process, and the result is a completely unique lens, in your prescription, in the frame of your choice, that has been designed for you alone. Your eyes no longer have to strain to make sense of the two different images, because the SHAW™ lens already takes the bulk of the work, if not all of it, creating a vision experience unlike the more common lens options available to you.
Our Eye Care Center of Ocala eye doctors strive to give you the best in quality eye care. Contact us to schedule an eye exam!
