Squintasaurus

Bizarre DIY project creates motorized head-mounted eye-squinting machine using parts from an old portable CD player, labels itself as a ’cybernetic dynamically adjustable vision enhancement system’ to replace glasses.

Created by Lee von Kraus:

I can’t see things very well at a distance. I used to wear classes, then contact lenses, then nothing. I hadn’t worn any corrective lenses for years because glasses were annoying and my contact lenses were messing up my eyes. One day I was thinking about the reason for near-sightedness and I figured that if it’s caused by an inability of the eye’s lenses to flatten out, then maybe I could physically assist them in some way instead of just optically correcting for the problem like ‘corrective lenses’ do. Then after trying some things I realized that I could pull back back on the skin at the sides of my eyes and this seemed to do the trick. Since then I’ve been in several seminars in which I successfully used this trick to be able to read the screen or chalkboard that was too far away for me to otherwise make out clearly. So I decided to make a simple device to do this for me. What I made probably wouldn’t be something that most people would want to wear in public, but a professionally made, miniaturized version of such a device might have more widespread appeal, and it was fun to make and test in any case.

More information, including a step-by-step guide to making one yourself, can be found at Instructables here