Since October 2013 we are participants on a new ongoing european project OPTICIAN2020. It is a 3-years-project and our second international project.
OPTICIAN2020 is the new project for Flexible and on-demand manufacturing of customised spectacles by close-to-optician production clusters, a 3-years-project co-funded by the European Commission within the Factories of the Future initiative of the 7th Framework Programme.
The project addresses the need for new manufacturing technologies for the local production of personalised spectacles. For a large variety of products, the use of innovative technologies of advanced manufacturing allows the total personalization, which provides end users with real added value. Customization strategies allow manufacturers and marketeers to offer unique products to end-user specifications and build them from the ground up to a given person’s needs and desires. Spectacles are a fashionable product combining health prescription, functional performance and aesthetical requirements. The 2020 ophthalmic industry paradigm will be that fully personalised spectacles are manufactured at dedicated optics local workshops based on the refractive prescription and the customers anatomical data and their fashion preferences.
The OPTICIAN2020 project builds on the outcomes of the European project Made4U (in which we were participants), successfully concluded in July 2012. In this project, several business models were investigated, in parallel to the development of scanning, design and manufacturing technologies suitable for personalised polymeric spectacles production, up to a pre-competitive stage.
OPTICIAN2020 will develop the technologies and processes necessary to demonstrate that the personalised spectacles business can be fashionable and, at the same time, a sustainable and profitable proximity manufacturing industry. Led by Fundación Privada Ascamm (Barcelona, Spain), the consortium is formed by 10 partners from 6 European countries and it balances the active participation of large, small & medium enterprises together with technological centres. The consortium brings together a wealth of expertise and resources within the areas of advanced manufacturing, personalised design, knowledge-based engineering for production, sustainable industrial production technologies, anthropometrics and ergonomics of human-product interaction, all joint under the vision care industry.