AI Product from Serbia Being Prepared for America – Local Company Developing Project of Digital Multifocal Glasses

We’ve heard a lot of stories about Serbian IT, record exports and incredible perspectives of the Serbian tech sector. It’s all true, but in 99% of the cases, it’s software (which, by the way, is mostly developed for foreigners per commission), whereas hardware’s presence is, unfortunately, merely symbolic.

However, that there is hardware and that Serbia has people who can make a globally relevant product, along with bigger companies like the Belgrade-based Visaris or Mikroelektronika, is now also shown by a small company – Ninox/Fuller Vision.

Fuller Vision is in the test phase of its project of digital multifocal glasses, a high-tech product with the implementation of artificial intelligence, which could find its way to the first customers in the Silicon Valley in the USA as soon as late 2024. Where these “digital glasses” came from and how come the USA, that is, Palo Alto in California, is the test market for the whole world are the questions that 24sedam talked about with the engineer Nebojsa Sabovic, the CTO and a co-founder of this startup with his colleague from the USA, Foster Reed.

– Reed and I wanted to make glasses that would return to our parents the kind of eyesight they had had before. Nowadays, there is no longer any reason why people can’t see well, with the help of technology, and why they can’t see at seventy the way they saw and were able to focus when they were children. Classic bifocal glasses are only a partial solution, because they have only two focuses, “near” and “far”, and 40+ people don’t like them because they make them “look old” – explains Sabovic.

All things considered, they have succeeded too, because the glasses are ready. This is a nearly 100% Serbian product, because only the plastic parts were produced in China, where all the leading world manufacturers have them produced as well, or the prototypes of printed circuit boards “by Sava the Serb in Macedonia”, where BMW or Mercedes have them done.

On top of all that, these are the glasses where it doesn’t matter whether what you’re looking at is right there in front of your face or dozens of meters away. Whatever the case may be, the focus will remain sharp, without having the feeling of wearing a technical assembly on your head. The lenses will adjust themselves to what the micro-cameras “record” in the field of view based on the data processed by the AI from the chip. It of course comes with a price, which, for Serbian conditions, is “a bargain” – USD 6,000.

– We are now in the phase of testing them on people and they should be available for sale by the end of the year. They will first be made available in the American market, because we have good contacts there, considering that we lived and worked in serious companies there. That is a perfect market, because there are many well-off people who still want to work in their mature or later years, but are hampered by poor eyesight which comes naturally with age. I like the idea of challenging the “common wisdom” about old people not seeing well – says Sabovic.

Of course, there is competition, because the problem being solved here is real and the potential audience is big. At Fuller Vision, they rely on the fact that their technology of a continuous change of the focus is unique, but also that others are targeting the 45+ market as a digital replacement for classic bifocal glasses, whereas they have concentrated on the 55+ segment, where not even those provide a solution.

Visaris d.o.o. Beograd

MIKROE doo Beograd

Ninox doo Beograd

Visaris

Mikroelektronika

Ninox Fuller Vision

Nebojša Šabović

Foster Reed

Fuller Vision

glasses