- You wanna kinda back up and just restate
what you just did,
so folks understand that you guys
really kinda greenfield it.
(hard rock intro music)
Hello and welcome to
the Laramy-K Optometrist Training Center,
where today we have, well, sort of a follow-up interview
with Tina Lahti from IOT.
A few months back,
we did a piece on their new Digital Ray-Path 2 Technology
and today we are going to talk about their new
Steady and Steady Plus Methodology.
Next week I'm gonna sit down with Janette
and we will talk about how these things effect
the Laramy-K brand.
Now a side note here,
I know that all kinds of people watch these videos
unless you personally deal one to one
with a whole sale optical lab,
ordering surfaced work,
some of this really isn't gonna make much sense to you.
But for anyone who does,
or maybe more important for anyone thinking
that it might be time to consider going
with an independent in house lens brand,
well, hopefully it will.
Hello there Tina.
- Hi John, thanks for having me on Optician Works again.
- Welcome, always good to see ya.
Last time we got together,
we did cover DRP 2,
so I'm gonna you a 30 seconds
to make your elevator pitch on that
and then we'll pick up with the new stuff.
- Digital Ray-Path 2 is IOT's
new foundational technology for
freeform personalized lenses.
It's our new ray trace technology.
We've worked hard over many years
and succeeded in creating more sophisticated math
for the design calculation.
This is the calculation that happens in the lab
when you create a personalized decompensated free form lens
for every individual.
So this technology allows us to create
personalized decompensated lenses with much sharper vision
and we've had this product out
for a while in single vision lenses
and we've gotten just amazing testimonials on them.
We've had it available in endless single vision
and endless single vision anti-fatigue.
So now we're very, very exited to bring this technology
into our progressive lens portfolio.
- All right, maybe, we both,
I'll throw up that video so people can track it down
and we'll leave a link as well at the end of this.
And yeah, I'll mention later on, I think,
Janette said we're getting excellent feedback
on the stuff that we have put out into the field so far.
- [Tina] That's great.
- What we did not talk about last time we got together,
is the Steady and the Steady Plus Methodology.
And quite frankly, as always,
I'm a little stuck on the images in the brochure
that you sent me.
They look, well, simply amazing.
I've never seen reductions in blur zone regions
of blur zone like that.
In the brochure, I keep seeing the word term, "mean power."
Mean power.
So let's start there
and tell me a little bit about what that means
and how it applies to the Steady and Steady Plus.
- As I'm sure many opticians know,
there are blur elements in any progressive lens.
They're required.
They're caused by the power change in the lens
and what has to happen to make that happen
on a smooth surface.
But there are two distinct elements of blur
in the lower peripheral, the progressive lens.
There's unwanted mean power.
And you'll see in the Steady Methodology paperwork,
and whitepapers, and articles,
we talk about unwanted mean power.
For opticians, this is a way of saying
spherical equivalent power.
So unwanted mean power
and then there's unwanted cylinder power.
And the industry for a long time has been working on
unwanted cylinder power,
but they are both two elements.
And here's a formula that will help you.
This is how we look at blur.
You can see that the formula includes
the difference between the target and perceived power.
Both for spherical equivalent and cylinder power.
So both elements go into blur.
For many years, as I said,
we've been working on cylinder power
and we specifically decide where to place this power
so wearers can accept it.
And we move it around
for different use case scenarios, right?
Different configurations of lenses.
If you want a distance lens, or a near lens,
or an intermediate lens, we move it all around.
But unwanted mean power was largely ignored.
And unwanted mean power also, as you saw in the formula,
contributes to blur,
and it plays a large role in the swim effect.
So the swim effect is the feeling of motion
that progressive lens wearers sometimes experience.
There are two images on the screen.
And the first image,
well they're both mean power maps, right?
So spherical equivalent power.
And what you're seeing is a map only of the unwanted
and wanted mean power,
in a personalized decompensated progressive lens.
This is a good personalized decompensated progressive lens,
but one without Steady Methodology.
So if we apply Steady Methodology,
we can virtually eliminate the unwanted mean power
that contributes to blur.
So these maps are of mean power, cylinder powers,
not here.
But what we can do, is we can address mean power
without increasing the necessary unwanted cylinder power.
- [John] All right. - So for wearers,
now these are, I'm showing you more images here.
This is an actual map of
the mean power difference overlaying a nice scene.
A place we would all want to be right now.
- [John] Right, yes. - Cause it's colder.
But this is what a progressive lens wearer would experience
for unwanted mean power for real.
With and without Steady Methodology.
So we say it virtually eliminates,
and you can see on the right,
there's still a little bit left.
But look how much that opens up
the distance vision
in a progressive lens, - [John] Yeah.
- [Tina] which is very important.
- I've never seen maps like that and granted,
we're not talking about actual vision for that lens,
or we're talking about that mean power distribution.
But still, that's pretty impressive math, that's for sure.
- And then you mentioned Steady Plus?
- Mmhmm.
- So Steady Plus is an improvement on Steady Methodology.
It's only available in Camber lenses.
So for Camber lens blanks.
And Camber lens blanks have a unique front surface
that gets steeper as you drop lower in the lens.
That frees us up to do more design work on the backside.
So in Camber lenses,
we have a design called Camber Steady Plus,
where we can control not only, very carefully,
the unwanted mean power, but the wanted mean power.
- [John] Okay. - So what you see here,
is the power that we want, the add power,
is much more symmetrical in nature,
and that will help with binocularity, and mid-range,
and near.
So those Camber wearers will get all the benefits
of the distance plus a little bit more in the near
for binocularity and width,
when their eyes work together reading.
- Is Steady Plus always combined with Camber?
Is that, those two are unique? - [Tina] Yes.
Okay. - [Tina] Yes.
- All right, we have got DRP2.
We talked about that last time.
Now we have Steady and Camber Steady Plus.
Those are coming online.
Are we talking about weeks, months, a year,
what are we talking about as a timeframe before we'll
see these out, in common?
- Sure, I would say over the next few months,
you'll see most of them.
We've redesigned every single lens
in our standard portfolio, which was over 20 designs.
It was a lot.
But most of the new progressive lens designs
are available now.
Some specialty designs will be coming over the next 60 days
into about late November.
But, this is a big but, we don't make lenses,
laboratories make lenses.
And even the best designs are useless
if they're not carefully and properly manufactured
by the laboratory.
So our partner laboratories, when they launch a new design,
they complete a huge quality analysis
and testing before they release new products.
So that process can take a few days
or it can take a few weeks,
depending on the complexity of
the manufacturing environment.
So I would say, check with your laboratory to see.
Sometime over the next couple weeks,
the majority of the designs will be available
for many labs and then the next couple of months,
I would guess, almost all of them.
- I know we are looking forward to it.
Now you just picked up on something
and I want to touch base on it again
because it's always worth reviewing
what it is that IOT does.
And in that opening piece,
I said, "A lot of people aren't gonna even really
understand because they don't make the connection
with a wholesale lab so this wouldn't make sense for them."
But a nice, simple, John the bearer of a little brain,
IOT is a lens design software company.
Laramy-K, the wholesale optical lab,
we have any agreement with IOT
that allows us to use your designs with our hardware
for a clicked fee,
and we rebrand those lenses as our own brand names.
And it sounds like you did some rebranding in order to,
kind of, tidy things up a little bit
for the global market.
For those people who are familiar with the IOT products,
the IOT catalog, the IOT designs, not lenses,
what does it mean for them?
What's the different?
- We're upgrading the technology
and releasing it in every single level
of design category we have.
So our premium top tier designs are all dual-sided
and they're created for Camber lenses,
which are made by Younger Optics,
a great independent lens manufacturing company.
They are top tier designs
and they're getting Steady Plus Methodology
and they've been completely rebuilt on Digital Ray-Path 2.
They're also getting an upgrade to their configurations.
So they'll be available in a regular design,
what we often in the industry call a, "Balanced Design."
And then if a laboratory chooses to,
they can have special configurations that emphasize
distance vision, intermediate vision, or near vision.
And those design,
we like to joke around and call them, "Flavors,"
are based on our ability to move around
the unwanted cylinder power in the lens,
that element of blur.
So that's the top tier.
In the middle, we're releasing, "Endless."
So we're releasing, "Endless Steady,"
also built on Digital Ray-Path 2.
And this is for any spherical lens blanks.
So laboratories like this
because they can pair it with any lens manufacture
that they want to
and that gives them great flexibility
for materials, and coatings, and whatever.
So that is our top tier for spherical lens blanks.
And it's personalized,
and decompensated,
and everything you would expect in a great, freeform lens.
And then we'll have another tier
category called, "Essential."
Essential lenses are not built on Digital Ray-Path 2.
They are not personalized, decompensated,
so that technology does not apply.
And sometimes you do, you have a use a very good,
but value lens offering.
That exists in the market.
So we're upgrading that as well because we can.
So Steady Methodology is even going on
that level of technology.
So new technology foundation for good, better,
and best for us.
And then we're doing the same
with all our specialty designs.
So we have office designs, anti-fatigue designs,
and single vision designs that are already done.
Pilot designs, sport designs, rap designs, you know,
whatever a laboratory needs to complete their portfolio
for their offering.
We've probably made it and it's available in the catalog.
- Gotcha, yeah, and like again you guys,
we'll be reviewing the Laramy-K pieces next week for you.
In several of the videos,
I say the changes being made to lenses now
are not the leaps and bounds
that they were 20 and 30 years ago,
but there are still being changes made,
and they are really, really important.
I think, I wanna kinda backup
and just restate what you just did so folks understand
that you guys really kinda greenfield it.
You've had the same technology base
and you were doing these small little increments of change
and just this past year basically,
you've really moved the line ahead a little bit
and changed some things.
The DRP2 is a truly different approach to lens design,
as is Steady, Steady Plus.
I don't want to put them in the leaps and bound categories,
but they're not incremental baby steps either.
These are changes that people will in fact see
when they wear these lenses.
Again, what I'm hearing from Janette,
the fraction of the stuff that we put out,
because we don't have all that yet, has not been released,
we're getting excellent feedback on it.
It's already looking forward to more of that.
Anything you would like to add?
- I think, just one last thing.
IOT for those of you who aren't familiar with us,
we're a very young academic technology company.
We were started as a university spinoff
in Madrid Spain 15 years ago, right?
So I was so young at the time. - [John] Yeah, yeah.
- Our first office was like 43 square feet
and in 2010 we partnered with Younger Optics here in the US.
A great independent lens manufacturing company.
And that really opened up the world to us
10 years ago when we opened our office
here in the United States in Torrance California
where we're headquartered today.
We still have technology centers and offices in Madrid
and in California.
We now have over 400 laboratory partners
who are in 69 countries world-wide.
They all utilize IOT technologies and services
and they produce tens of millions of lenses last year.
So that was super exciting.
All of this has come from our relationship
with our partners, the constant feedback we get from them,
and the wearer trials we do.
And we've branched out in technologies.
So now we do not only the lens design software
that you talked about,
that all of these lenses are based on,
but we do photochromic lens blanks,
we help lens labs with quality monitoring,
software systems,
all kinds of different technologies
that labs need to make lenses.
Because labs make lenses.
- Yeah. - So, what's allowed
all of this to happen are great partners like Laramy-K,
that have encouraged us to keep learning, keep growing,
keep improving, like keep producing better stuff,
so that when you release your private label,
you can always say, "Hey, this is the best."
This is the best and you're getting it just from us.
So thank you, thank you for your support and contributions
and we've just all gotten to this point together.
- Likewise, yes, absolutely.
I've met, I've had the pleasure of meeting Daniel and IOT.
If every young academic company had started off
as a university spinoff,
I just have this overwhelming awe of those guys.
I mean, these folks,
these are doctor level mathematicians, physicists.
These are like crazy, crazy smart people.
And they just happen to start exploring this,
one of the most complex areas possible.
Lens design and they pulled this together
and they made it work.
It's just so cool.
And then again, it's nice to be apart of it,
that's for sure.
Quick review.
DRP2, Steady, Camber Steady Plus.
If you are already part of this
or thinking it's time to become a part of this,
want to start working with IOT, working with a IOT lab,
get in touch with us.
We'll put up Tina's contact information as well.
And again guys, maybe it is time to start thinking about,
you know, independent branding of your own progressive line
in house.
Equal to or far surpassing probably what you're buying
from the big names.
You will be happy, your customer's will be happy,
and you'll probably even make a little bit more money,
which is always the good thing in business.
All right, anything else to add there Tina?
- No, thank you so much for having us.
- We're good, as always, you are most welcome.
All right.
See ya.