In 2015, a Canadian optometrist made headlines with a bold promise: an implant called the Ocumetics Bionic Lens that would be slipped into the eye in an eight-minute procedure and give people vision three times sharper than 20/20, for life. More than ten years later, the lens is still not on the market. Ocumetics reported its first implantation in a human patient in August 2025, as part of an early clinical trial, and no regulator has approved it. The "superhuman vision" claim has not been shown in any published human results.
Here is what was promised, how the technology is meant to work, and what the science of eyesight says about the more dramatic claims.
What the Bionic Lens was supposed to do
The lens was the project of Dr. Garth Webb, an optometrist from British Columbia. In interviews reported by CBC News in May 2015, he described it as a replacement for the eye's own lens that would end the need for reading glasses, varifocals and contact lenses at any age. He called it "vision enhancement that the world has never seen before."
His example was simple: someone who could just make out a clock at 10 feet would be able to read it at 30 feet. He said the best candidates would be adults over about 25, once the eye has finished developing, and that because the natural lens is removed, recipients would never develop cataracts.
Webb said the project had taken about eight years and around $3 million, covering research, international patents and a biomedical manufacturing site in Delta, British Columbia. His motivation was personal. He had worn glasses since the second grade and wanted to free himself and others from them; his childhood heroes, he joked, were cowboys, and cowboys did not wear glasses.
Dr. Garth Webb, the British Columbia optometrist behind the Bionic Lens, photographed in 2015. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press)
How the procedure was meant to work
The design follows the same basic idea as modern cataract surgery. The custom-made lens would be folded, loaded into a syringe filled with saline and injected through a tiny opening. Inside the eye it would unfold in about ten seconds. Webb said the whole operation would take roughly eight minutes and improve vision straight away.
That part is less futuristic than it sounds. Cataract surgery, in which the clouded natural lens is replaced with an artificial intraocular lens (IOL), is one of the most common operations in the world, with close to 28 million procedures a year worldwide according to figures from 2021. It is usually done with local or topical anaesthesia, often takes under half an hour, and uses foldable lenses that pass through a small incision. Recovery still takes a few weeks, and like any surgery it carries risks such as infection, inflammation, halos at night and, rarely, retinal detachment.
Webb presented his design in 2015 to a group of 14 ophthalmologists at a meeting of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery in San Diego, and said the reception was enthusiastic. One of them, Dr. Vincent DeLuise, who taught at Yale and Weill Cornell, told CBC the device could bring surgeons "closer to the holy grail of excellent vision at all ranges — distant, intermediate and near."
Can any lens give "three times 20/20" vision?
This is the claim that deserves the most caution. "20/20" (6/6 in metric) is not perfect vision; it is a standard reference point meaning that you can read at 20 feet what a typical normal eye reads at 20 feet. Many healthy young adults already see better than that, often around 20/16 or 20/13, and the best unaided human acuity sits around 20/10 to 20/8.
Those limits are set not only by the lens but by the rest of the eye. The cone cells in the centre of the retina are packed only so tightly, and light passing through the pupil spreads out through diffraction, which caps sharpness at roughly 20/8 to 20/9 even with flawless optics. Vision three times sharper than 20/20 would mean about 20/7, beyond what the retina and the physics of light allow for a lens sitting inside the eye. A better lens can remove blur caused by focusing errors; it cannot add detail the retina cannot register.
The realistic goal, and the one the company now describes, is different and still valuable: clear focus at all distances without glasses.
Why focusing at every distance is so hard
A young natural lens is flexible. When the ciliary muscle contracts, the lens changes shape and the eye refocuses from far to near, a process called accommodation. With age the lens stiffens, which is why most people need reading glasses in their 40s.
Standard IOLs are fixed: most patients get sharp distance vision and still need glasses for reading. Multifocal lenses split light between distances, which can cost contrast or cause halos. "Accommodating" IOLs try to move or change shape with the eye's own muscles, as the Bionic Lens aims to do. The idea is not new; the Crystalens was approved in the United States in 2003. But accommodating lenses in use so far have generally given only limited near-vision improvement, and the benefit tends to fade over time. Ocumetics is betting its design will do better, which is exactly what trials need to prove.
The "never get cataracts" claim is technically true, because a cataract is a clouding of the natural lens and that lens is removed. But a common after-effect of lens surgery, posterior capsule opacification, can blur vision months later in a sizeable share of patients. It is usually fixed with a quick laser treatment.
What happened after 2015
Webb predicted the lens could be available in Canada and elsewhere within about two years, after animal tests and trials in blind eyes. That timeline slipped badly, which is common for new medical devices.
In May 2022, Ocumetics said it was still in preclinical work, testing how the lens fitted in donated cadaver eyes, refining its shape, materials and injector, and that formal regulatory approval had not yet begun. In August 2025, the company announced the first implantation of its accommodating lens in a human patient, and said its clinical programme would focus on safety, effectiveness and long-term performance. It did not publish patient numbers or vision results in that announcement.
So the honest summary is that the project is alive and has reached human testing, but none of its headline promises has yet been demonstrated in published data.
What this means if you are thinking about eye surgery
Webb's view that perfect eyesight should be a human right is easy to share, and he hoped the lens would one day replace laser eye surgery. For now, though, the options available are established ones: glasses, contact lenses, laser refractive surgery, implantable contact lenses and, for cataracts, standard monofocal, multifocal or extended-depth-of-focus IOLs. Each has trade-offs that depend on your eyes, age and lifestyle.
When you see a headline promising effortless "superhuman" vision, a few questions help: has the device been approved by a regulator, are there published results in people, and how many patients were followed and for how long? If your vision is changing or you are considering any eye procedure, talk to an optometrist or ophthalmologist about what suits you.
Would you choose a lens implant over glasses if it were proven safe? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Nelson Voice: Ocumetics update, May 2022; Eyewire News: Ocumetics announces first-in-human implantation, August 2025; Wikipedia: Intraocular lens; Wikipedia: Visual acuity. Original 2015 reporting by CBC News, via Collective Evolution; photo by Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press.
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I would love to be a part of the human trials!!
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