I go to a lot of meetings in eye care.
Most of them blur together pretty quickly. A new study. A new device. A panel about the future that feels a lot like the present.
Last week in Orlando felt different.
The SWITCH Summit
EssilorLuxottica’s inaugural SWITCH: Vision Innovation Summit brought together conversations around AI-enabled eyewear, oculomics, neuroscience, myopia management and the broader future of vision care and health care. But what stayed with me was not any single product or demo. It was the feeling that several ideas many of us have been talking about for years are no longer living at the edges of the conversation.
They are starting to move into the mainstream.
That was my biggest takeaway from the meeting.
Mapping the Future
Take oculomics. We have been talking about the eye as a window into systemic health for a while now. In research circles, in startup circles, in AI circles, this has not been new. But at SWITCH, it did not feel like a fringe idea anymore. It felt like an assumption in the room of more than 1,000.The idea that the eye may reveal signals about cardiovascular disease, neurologic disease, metabolic disease and broader health is no longer just an interesting concept. It is increasingly part of how people are thinking about the future of health care.
That matters.
Because once a field becomes mainstream, the question changes. The question is no longer, “Is this real?” The question becomes, “How do we actually use it?”
In some ways, retinal imaging may eventually become the ECG of the 21st century: a quick, non-invasive window into systemic health that physicians use routinely to screen for disease.
That may sound bold, but I do not think it is crazy anymore.
Humans Are More Important Than Hardware
And yet one of the most important lines I heard at the meeting had nothing to do with technology. Carl Spear, OD, and Chief Medical Officer at EssilorLuxottica, referenced an Army saying: Humans are more important than hardware.
That stuck with me.
Because events like this can easily become a parade of capabilities. Better sensors. Smarter algorithms. More ambient computing. More intelligence at the edge. And all of that is exciting. But if the technology does not make people healthier, help clinicians care for patients better, or improve how human beings function in the real world, then it is just clever hardware.
The goal is not more hardware.
The goal is better human health.
Smart Glasses
That idea also shaped how I thought about the conversation regarding smart glasses.
There was a lot of energy around AI-enabled eyewear, understandably so. And I came away more convinced than I used to be that this category matters. But probably not for the most obvious reasons. The consumer-use cases will get plenty of attention: capturing moments, querying AI, accessing information, staying connected. Fine. But my hot take is that the more interesting long-term opportunity is in health.
If glasses become a platform for monitoring, sensing and interpreting behavior and physiology, that keeps eye care much closer to the patient. And that is where this gets really interesting for our field.
We should want that.
We should want smart glasses that do more than relay notifications or answer trivia. We should want solutions that can eventually support health applications, monitoring, earlier detection and better continuity between patients and providers. Glasses sit in a privileged place. They are close to the eye, close to vision, close to attention, close to behavior. That is valuable real estate if you care about human function or disease.
Smart Glasses as A Neural Interface
One idea that especially caught my attention was glasses as a neural interface.
A few years ago, if you had said that sentence out loud, it might have sounded a bit ridiculous. Now it sounds early, but plausible. EEG sensors in the temples. Passive sensing. Signals about attention, fatigue, cognition, maybe even disease state. There are obvious consumer applications there. There are also obvious health applications there.
If eyewear really does evolve into a neural interface, then it stops being just a product category.
It becomes a health platform.
And if that happens, eye care providers should not be watching from the sidelines while everyone else defines what it is for.
At the same time, I do not think glasses are automatically the winner in the race to become our AI companion. That part still feels open. AirPods-type devices, pins, pendants, cameras and other ambient wearables all have a shot. There is nothing inevitable about glasses winning just because they are glasses.
Which is exactly why fashion and culture are not side issues here.
They are central.
In fact, I would go further: they may be just as important as the technology.
People do not wear things simply because the engineering is good. They wear things because the product fits into their identity, their habits and their sense of self. Eyewear has a real advantage there. It already lives at the intersection of utility, style and personal expression in a way most health devices do not.
That is not decorative. That is strategic.
Adjusting to the Technology
I used to think smart glasses would always feel a little weird. And maybe for a while they still will. But as Khizer Khaderi, MD, MPH, reminded me on a recent episode of AI Innovators, the next generation probably will not think so at all. To them, wearable intelligence may feel normal.
And honestly, we have seen this movie before.
Remember when AirPods first came out? They looked strange. People joked about them. Then culture shifted, and suddenly they were everywhere. A lot of technology feels awkward right up until the moment it does not.
That is why the social acceptability piece matters so much. It is not a nice-to-have. It is the unlock.
The Real Bottleneck
My other hot take leaving SWITCH is that the real bottleneck here may not be the technology at all.
It may be the care model.
Our current eye care system is still largely built around episodic visits, fragmented data, limited time and reactive workflows. If oculomics matures, if health sensing in eyewear matures, if continuous data starts to matter, then the hard part will not just be building the sensor or training the model. The hard part will be deciding what to do with the information. Who follows it? Who gets alerted? How do we triage it? How do we reimburse for it? How do we avoid overwhelming clinicians while still helping patients?
That is a systems problem, not a hardware problem.
And it may turn out to be the bigger challenge.
A Change in Direction
Maybe that is why the name SWITCH worked for me by the end of the event. A switch is not just a new gadget. It is a change in direction.
From reactive care to predictive care.
From isolated eye exams to connected health signals.
From glasses as passive objects to glasses as intelligent interfaces.
Not all of this will happen at once. Some of it will take longer than people think. Some of the products will fail. Some of the hype will fade. That is normal.
But something did feel different in Orlando.
Ideas that used to sound speculative now feel mainstream enough that we can no longer treat them like side conversations.
That, to me, was the real story of SWITCH. Not that the future is settled. It clearly is not. It is that eye care may be moving much closer to the center of what comes next than many people in our field realize.
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