Inscribing a spiral in the centre of a contact lens seems to create optical vortices that interact so that the lens provides a clear image of objects at all distances
By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
8 February 2024
A contact lens inscribed with the spiral design
Laurent Galinier
Lenses featuring a trippy, spiral design could offer an alternative to traditional multifocal lenses. They seem to produce clearer images than standard multifocals, even in dim light.
The lenses were created by inventor Laurent Galinier. When Bertrand Simon at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School in France met Galinier through a scientific collaboration, he immediately wanted to test the lenses in the lab.
Read more
How this moment for AI will change society forever (and how it won't)
Advertisement
The lens is round like a conventional contact lens but it has a neatly coiled spiral created with a lathe on its surface. This spiral shape modifies the path that light rays take through the lens, meaning the lens doesn’t have a single focal point but several – some closer to the lens and some further away from it.
Exactly how the spiral shape does this is unclear, but Simon says it seems to twist the light rays and create optical vortices – like mini tornadoes of light – that somehow interact with each other.
In the lab, Simon and his colleagues analysed laser light that passed through the spiral lenses and simulated the process on a computer. In a head-to-head comparison with a conventional multifocal lens, the spiral lens offered more clarity and detail when lots of light passed through it, and it still worked well under dim light conditions.