Founder Spotlight: Neal Weinstock (Soliddd)

This week, I had the privilege of interviewing Neal Weinstock at Soliddd. Soliddd provides true vision correction for macular degeneration; having seen the impact of macular degeneration up close in my own family, I am so thankful builders like Neal and his team are working to on solutions. Neal is a member of our second-ever AgeTech NYC Accelerator, so please join us at the official AgeTech NYC #Techweek event on June 3rd, hosted by our friends at Senior Planet to watch Neal’s live presentation.

Grab a coffee and join me in learning about Neil’s mission with Soliddd.

— Sarah Richard

What inspired you to build your company?

My founding partners and I started out to build something else, and I could never have dreamed that Soliddd would pursue the goals we now have. Physics professor (at UC Berkeley) Richard A. Muller and I set out to create the world's most amazingly great and gigantic no-glasses 3D display. We produced a beautiful prototype after a few years of hard work, but by then the market for 3D had gone away and even the market for movie theaters, where we wanted to deploy our technology, was starting to disappear. But I started to have an inkling that our core technology could have a higher purpose. My father had gone blind from glaucoma, and before that I'd long been intrigued by his attempts to explain to me--an extremely nearsighted kid with dyslexia--how his hyper visual acuity allowed him to see the threads on a baseball as it left a pitcher's arm, and to therefore choose which pitch he would swing at. I started to understand that Soliddd could build on the optics we'd created to do some very special things on a very small scale for vision correction.

What problem are you solving, and for whom?

We provide full field sight with good visual acuity for people with macular degeneration (or AMD) and Stargardt disease. We also seem to help many other conditions that block some portion of the visual field, but so far we have only done rigorous testing for AMD and Stargardt's. We will do more testing this summer and bring out our first generation electronic eyeglasses later this year. Virtually everyone gets AMD if we live long enough. Hundreds of millions of older people suffer from it around the world, are less able to be independent because of it, have higher incidence of depression and dementia because of it. We look forward to giving sight to most people with AMD.

What makes your solution different or better than what’s out there today?

NW: Our optics allowed us to make an amazing discovery about the human brain. If we provide properly coordinated fly's eye (or "plenoptic") views of the world in full focus at infinity--like multiple pinholes but highly optimized with special lens design and software and aimed at all areas of the retina--the brain automatically puts those views together into a single stereo image. Just as people with normal, healthy vision automatically see in stereo with two eyes, so people wearing our SolidddVision glasses see automatically in stereo from over 100 views. And if some areas of the retina are blocked by AMD or other issues, the brain gets the image from other areas. No-one ever knew about this brain functionality before we discovered it. So there are many other low-vision aids on the market, but none of them provide sight to those areas of the visual field lost to AMD. They may add magnification, brightness, or contrast, or describe in words what the user can't see. Those are easy to do, but don't help users very much. Only Soliddd provides actual sight where people living with AMD have not been able to see.

What have you learned from working with older adults and caregivers so far?

NW: I learn more about our science and what our technology can accomplish from virtually everyone we test. I would not have been able to discover what we have without the generous commitments made by a great many older patients and their physicians and caregivers. And then seeing the joy people show in the beautiful experience of restored sight is tremendously powerful. I'm deeply grateful to be able to be a part of it.

What’s next for Soliddd in the next 6-12 months?

NW: We will be doing extensive testing this summer with desktop-based devices that we will locate in a few places at major medical and research institutions in the US and Europe. That will help us prove our effectiveness for many other issues besides AMD, and also help develop our software. And it will allow people to get into our pipeline to get our product when we bring it out a few months later. We want to introduce our SolidddVision glasses to the world late this year or early next year.