I’m thinking that bifocals came about when we discovered that we could not use the same spectacles to see both near and far. I’m wondering if it is possible to build in a prescription into spectacles that would permit the user to glance down and see a reasonably large image of a webpage that is on an i-phone or a similar web-connected device. No one can reasonably expect to read that tiny print. And for those people who do a fair amount of reading on the internet, the handhelds will never be practical. Unless it would be easy to just tip the head (not unlike we do when reading) to look at the hand-held with its teeny tiny internet page all magnified and easier to read. Suppose that glasses will eventually be like that?
I don’t understand what you’re asking. Are you saying you want bifocals with magnifying lenses on the bottom? Because you can get reading glasses just like that.
FWIW, I have no trouble reading the SDMB on my iPhone without glasses.
Yes, I believe I’m talking about magnifying lenses built into spectacles. I don’t have an i-phone, but it seems that the print on pages that are filled with text would be very, very small. I don’t want to have to hold the thing up to my nose in order to read it. I can sit back from the computer screen and read most text, and I imagine I’d need a quite powerful prescription to hold the i-phone at book distance and read it, which is what I’d like to be able to do. Minimal eye strain, minimal and narrow back and forth line scanning.
At the risk of sounding snarky, no one would or has made such a device. If a character of text were in the 1-4 pixel range, no amount of magnification would make it readable: you’d just get large unreadable text.
They’ll let even non-Apple owners into the Apple stores now (you just need to sing a few bars of “Hail to Steve Jobs”). Go play with one.
Displaying whole pages, if you do it at all, is just for navigation. Taping a block of text twice magnifies it to reading size, flicking a finger in any direction scrolls, and if you want more precise zooming, you can “pinch” or “spread” with two fingers to resize exactly.
Other mobile web browsers have similar ways of subsetting the information on a page – none of them expect you to read 8.5 x 11 pages on and inch-or-two device.
Yeah, I couldn’t point you to a specific source for getting them, but I’ve seen bi-focal style glasses that had no prescription on top, and reading-glass magnification at the bottom. I believe they were even transitional bi-focals so that there wasn’t an abrupt line where they gave way to reading glasses. I guess it might depend on where you live, but around here you don’t need any sort of prescription to get reading glasses, so you could probably buy them without much hassle.
Incidentally, there are bifocal contact lenses, as well, but I’m not sure how well they work. I’ve never heard of “reading” contact lenses, though. I’m not sure whether that’s even optically possible with contacts.
It also helps in reading the iPhone if you’re really really nearsighted. Really.
Being nearsighted myself your premise isn’t going to work to turn the little ipod screen into a into a high res monitor viewed the same way as the one at your personal computer. Using powerful reading glasses will only allow you to focus on very small areas of the Ipod screen at once.
It’s not going to be like the big picture view you get using a real LCD monitor from a few feet away. Whether this is due to the biomechanics of human vision, depth of field or whatever I don’t know, but it’s not going to work the you expect regardless of the prescription.