Dr. Garth Webb, an optometrist who invented the Ocumetic Bionic Lens, says patients would have perfect vision and that contact lenses would become a memory as the eye-care industry is transformed. People who have the lenses inserted would never get cataracts because their natural lense would have been replaced.
Perfect eyesight would result "no matter how crummy your eyes are," Webb says, adding the Bionic Lens would be an option for someone who depends on corrective lenses and is over about age 25, when the eye structures are fully developed. "This is vision enhancement that the world has never seen before," he says, showing a Bionic Lens, which looks like a tiny button.
"If you can just barely see the clock at 10 feet, when you get the Bionic Lens you can see the clock at 30 feet away," says Webb, demonstrating how a custom-made lens that folded like a taco in a saline-filled syringe would be placed in an eye, where it would unravel itself within 10 seconds.
He says the painless procedure, identical to cataract surgery, would take about eight minutes and a patient’s sight would be immediately corrected. Webb, who is the CEO of Ocumetics Technology Corp., has spent the last eight years and about $3 million researching and developing the Bionic Lens, getting international patents and securing a biomedical manufacturing facility in Delta, B.C.