Futureworld brings you Mindbullets: News from the Future to spark thinking about leadership, innovation and digital disruption. These fictitious scenarios aim to challenge conventional mindsets and promote understanding of the future context for business.
Dateline: January 29 2026
Prescription lens manufacturers have been hard-hit by the latest trend in 3D printing — stick-on prescription lenses. Since 2015, when 3D printed lenses first entered the market, the landscape has been dominated by a few large players. Recent advancements in substrate technology hit the consumer market in a big way.
The 3D-printed stickers enable consumers to “script” any pair of glasses, without the cost of expensive lenses, coatings, or optometric consultation fees. Thousands of small print shops have opened, seemingly overnight, enabling consumers to cut out several middlemen. All you need is your glasses script, a pair of off-the-shelf frames or sunglasses, freely available open-source software, and the right “inks”, which are now widely available.
As Dale Cunningham from Zeiss Vision Care’s US office said in a recent tweet, “With lens ‘printing’ going mainstream, the only thing left for the established industry to do is to innovate like crazy to come up with something Jonny Consumer can’t do for themselves.”
The self-adhesive prescription film was developed by building on the technology pioneered in 3D printing contact lenses. The 3D printing of contact lenses first emerged in the early 2020s as an alternative production technique to the traditional spin-casting, moulding, and lathe machining processes developed in the 1970s. Like traditional lens processes and technology — first developed in the 1880s — 3D printing of contact lenses has come a long way. Without the advancements in microfabrication techniques, miniaturisation methods, and hydrodynamic mediums of the past decade, it’s unlikely ‘print-your-own lenses’ would have come about.
As technologies continue to be democratised, they become cheaper and more readily available to end users. With mainstream availability of the raw materials, it’s only a matter of time before some innovative “Jonny Consumer” — as Cunningham put it — bridges the gap. Now, it’s left to established lens manufacturers to find a way to differentiate themselves and their offering again, or face seeing things from the other side of redundancy.
- First published on Mindbullets February 2 2023
See the world through my eyes
Sharing your real-time view of life is bigger than Twitter or Instagram
Dateline: April 26 2019
We had blogs, then vlogs, then Twitter and Periscope; everything becomes more immediate, as the news cycle and attention spans shorten. Remember when, a couple of years ago, a passenger was dragged off a United plane? The video of the poor guy went viral in hours.
Now, the latest social media phenomenon is to share what you see — in real time, using Samsung’s video contact lenses, called Viddyize. People who subscribe to your feed can see what you see — as you see it. With Viddyize, we could have watched from the passenger’s point of view, as the goons came to haul him off the flight.
The revolutionary tech has a transparent camera lens embedded in your contact lens. You see right through it, and the video is streamed via your smartphone to the cloud. Yes, you still need a phone or similar wearable to provide the battery life and cloud connectivity, but you don’t need bulky glasses that require recharging to capture the image. The lenses are all but invisible.
This trend is rewriting the perception of fake news and “on location” reporting. There are so many live feeds available at any one time now, media companies such as CNN, Facebook and Google have developed AI systems just to separate the interesting breaking news from the fluff. Humans can’t handle the deluge.
If you live an interesting life, or just happen to be on the spot when the next story breaks, you won’t need to reach for a camera or phone; just open your eyes.
But don’t blink too much, as that kills the image.
- First published on Mindbullets April 13 2017
• Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking.
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