For those of you who thought buying a pair of Oakley sunglasses was just to make you look cool, well think again. Oakley has gone above and beyond with an innovation to their sunglasses, creating special tinted lenses that help improve athlete’s ability to see certain details based on the tint in their glasses as they are competing in their respective sports. This enhancement of Oakley’s sunglasses is purely for in-sport improvement, and Oakley has come out with over 70 different kinds of tinted lenses since it came up with this idea. In a more technical sense, “optic science has stepped in to provide a way to filter out color wavelengths that will limit your ability to see clearly, balancing the right colors for the right environment.”
In a Sports Illustrated article by Tim Newcomb, the new Oakley tinted-lens glasses are discussed in terms of helping bikers see their trails better when they are riding. The tint of the lens allows the athletes to focus more on the details of their trail, identifying possible hazards such as roots and rocks and other things that could trip them up along the way, making it easier for them to avoid them and get a faster time in their races. The way the glasses allow for this is by filtering out certain wavelengths of light, letting certain colors in and keeping others out, causing your eyes to be able to focus easier on the terrain without straining your eyes to shut out some of the light that is coming through to your eye. The tint provides an extra buffer for athletes as they are biking, giving their eyes less of a challenge to focus on the trails.
The actual science behind these glasses is truly fascinating. Going back to biking, when going down a trail, “a typical sunglass lens will allow in 10 percent of all light, across all wavelengths. The VR28 Black Iridium, for example, allows in 35 to 40 percent of reds and yellows, but just above 8 percent of all blues, allowing you to discern the details in the ground’s muddied dirt, to see whether the soil is loose or hard and where exactly the root stops.” With this added safeguard, bikers can see much better, race faster, and not worry as much about the possibility of hitting a root hidden by the light, because now they will be able to see it. These new glasses will definitely be beneficial in preventing the amount of biker crashes per race.
These glasses don’t just help bikers on their trails, but extend to many other sports. Oakley has developed blue tinted lenses that help surfers read the currents better, green tinted lenses that allow golfers to read the greens easier, and much more. Oakley works to create a specific lens for each type of situation, determining “a specific color spectrum for each environment that leads engineers to determine the best absorbers for that exact type of lens.” Oakley further improves the lens by polarizing coating that “shields even more light and offers the ability to reflect light waves that cause glare.” These additional protection measures are all designed to help the human eye focus more on the details of what’s going on around him or her when competing, rather than fighting the sun.
Oakley has made some great strides in terms of enhancing some of the most popular action sports with their glasses, and they are preparing to go much higher. Plans are already in the works for special tints that will allow baseball players to pick up the red seams of a baseball earlier. This will certainly enhance the game of baseball, allowing hitters to get more of an advantage in a now defense and pitching dominated game. Hitters reading the seams of the ball even a fraction of a second earlier will allow them to pick up the type of pitch being thrown and possibly the location of the ball when it crosses home plate, giving them a bit more time to adjust and put a better swing on the ball. This type of technology may be just the thing baseball needs to return it to a balanced game or possibly a hitters paradise.
Thinking beyond what Newcomb reported in Sports Illustrated, Oakley could engineer a pair of tints that match the black (or whatever color) lines of a soccer ball. If a goalie were wearing these glasses, he or she could use them to his or her advantage because it would be easier to see the rotation of the soccer ball more clearly as it is approaching, allowing the goalie to make a better guess at where the ball is being shot on goal and make a better play on the ball. It’s hard enough to score a goal in soccer already, but with these glasses, the difficulty level could be amplified even more.
These new specially tinted sunglasses could bring a revolution to the sporting world, allowing athletes to see more clearly and discern more details when they are out there contending. In fact, it may even cause some sports to completely turn around in terms of the way they are seen; i.e. baseball moving from a pitching and defense game back to a hitting one. One thing is for sure though, Oakley has really hit a gold mine here with this new product, and they are definitely far from finished with it.