The Opus Design Award is an annual design competition open to conceptual designs of eyewear. Here’s the winner in 2008:
Switch, by Nick Jinkinson, is an eyewear that fully goes from ‘normal’ eyewear mode to ‘shades’ mode, and this won the Gold Prize. According to the designer:
Traditional photochromic eyewear suffers from the problem that the overall design of
the eyewear is usually biased towards one typology: normal glasses or sunglasses. When in tinted mode, normal glasses do not look like convincing sunglasses and therefore can appear compromised. This limits the appeal, which considering how practical it is, is a great shame. Switch addresses this by making a more complete transformation between states. Rather than just the lenses reacting to light, the arms and nose bridge do also, making a distinction between 100% normal glasses and 100% sunglasses.
Another entry that I thought was quite interesting was ClearVision by Emil-Dragos Brogdan (winning one of the Special Prizes). Observing that wiping the lenses off dust/moisture/grease was a regular action for the bespectacled, the bridge of this design incorporates cleaning mechanisms as well so you’d not need to bring along any other cloth (or even your sleeve).
