Eyenavision & Roger Bacon Eyewear Partner to Offer 3D Printed Glasses, Transforming Industry

When you have an entire family wearing glasses, it can become a central ‘focus.’ Someone has always misplaced them, a little one doesn’t want to don her new eyewear, or the worst—they are constantly slipping down the bridge of the nose and falling off when you look down. It seems I always have a note to have some sort of maintenance performed on eyewear. It’s a precarious business as without glasses, we cannot function throughout our day. Let’s not even get started on prescription sunglasses!

Eyewear can also be a lot of fun in terms of fashion though, ‘making’ your look. The challenge is pulling it all together in terms of function, fashion, and most of all—fit. If you don’t have a good fit, not much else matters. And thanks to 3D printing, that one-size-fits-all world is quickly fading. While there are a wide range of benefits to 3D printing, nearly all of them can apply to the eyewear industry, most especially customization, coupled with great affordability.

And while showing up to work with a cool new pair of 3D printed glasses has an allure all of its own, now thanks to a partnership between Eyenavision and Roger Bacon Eyewear, you can have it all.

“Our goal is to provide people with modern, innovative eyewear at a practical price,” Colleen Zewe of Eyenavision told 3DPrint.com. “The best part of 3D printed glasses is that they can be custom-made to fit the customer’s face. Each pair is unique and fits the wearer’s face perfectly.”

As the exclusive distributor of Roger Bacon Eyewear, Eyenavision will be sending out store displays and accepting frame orders this summer from independent optical retailers in the US.

“We are pleased to partner with Eyenavision to roll out Roger Bacon Eyewear in the United States,” said Pieter Jonkheer, CEO of Roger Bacon. “We look forward to additional products and features that will reinforce our belief that our customers should feel one with their eyewear.”

The system is quite scientific in terms of making sure you have the exact fit for your face, with Roger Bacon Eyewear offering the first ‘made to measure’ 3D printed collection available through retailers. Because every face is unique, the Roger Bacon team believes that every pair of glasses should also be. To see that happen, they developed a proprietary system using a biometric scanner attached to an iPad. With this, opticians are able to obtain precise measurements and produce custom 3D printed frames.

Eyewear care providers who provide Roger Bacon Eyewear will have both scanner and visualization units that allow customers to see any frame in the collection using their own image on an LCD display. There are 20 frame shapes to choose from currently, each available in 10 colors, with a continuously new supply of frames being added. The entire system is streamlined for everyone involved, with orders then placed on the same iPad through the Roger Bacon cloud-based ordering system. Once frames are custom 3D printed, parts are provided to Eyenavision for assembly, final inspection, and distribution.

“Retailers will be truly amazed at the Roger Bacon Eyewear system,” said Joseph Zewe, CEO of Eyenavision. “Not only is the in-store experience unique, but the fit and quality of the frames is exceptional.”

Once again, with 3D printing, a new future is being shaped for another industry as retailers offering Roger Bacon Eyewear won’t be required any longer to spend large amounts of their budget on frame ‘buy-ins’ or be inconvenienced with trying to exchange frames that were poor sellers. While samples will be on hand, the actual designs are just downloaded to the iPad.

“Roger Bacon represents a whole new category of eyewear and an opportunity for early adopters to differentiate their practice from the competition,” states Zewe.

Representatives of Eyenavision and the founders of Roger Bacon, Pieter Jonckheer and Jan-Berend Zweerts, will be demonstrating the Roger Bacon system at Vision Expo East, the world’s largest eyewear and eyecare show—to be held in New York City at the Javits Center from April 14-17. They will begin accepting pre-orders from retailers at the Expo, and will start shipping in store display units and accepting frame orders on July 1, 2016.

We’ve followed many stories on 3D printed eyewear, from high-fashion sunglasses to mood glasses to a hip assortment of European styles. This partnership between Eyenavision and Roger Bacon, however, represents the first system showing true potential for an impact in the marketplace, and tremendous added benefits for both customers and retailers all around.

Eyenavision Inc. is a technology based eyewear company whose products include the patented Chemistrie Lens Layering System. Their headquarters are in Pittsburgh, PA.

Roger Bacon Eyewear is a Dutch company that is committed to using digital manufacturing technologies to produce eyewear that is both beautiful in design and fitted to the individual’s biometrical features.

What do you think of this trend in eyewear? Discuss in the 3D Printed Retail Eyewear forum over at 3DPB.com.