The breakdown of IXI’s testing phase
Before IXI Autofocus Eyewear ships, it has to survive everything we can throw at it. So, we break them, learn, fix them, and break them again. Just ask Juha Timonen, our Head of R&D, who has made stress testing something of an art form.
Q: When you try and break IXI, what exactly are you doing?
A: Well, we throw everything we can at them: mosquito repellent, face cream, artificial sweat, cleaning chemicals, extreme heat, and water. We use the same machine Nokia famously tested their phones in, and drop IXI thousands of times. We also test the hinges in a stress machine that bends the temples over and over to make sure they hold.
Q: Beyond the physical stuff, what else has to be proven?
A: Everything electronic gets tested: charging, charging speed, startup, and shutdown. But the real challenge is gaze sensing. We use it to measure distance, so the lenses know when to adjust. The problem is every face is different, eye position, shape, profile, and the system needs to be calibrated individually.
Getting calibration to stick is harder than it sounds and no one wants to recalibrate every time they pick up their IXI’s. So we built Kekkonen. Yes, named after the Finnish president. Kekkonen tests eyeball movements at a level of consistency that would send a human tester home early.
Q: How do you make sure nothing ever goes wrong?
A: That’s the question we ask ourselves across every component and every scenario. Dirty lenses could throw off gaze sensing. A dropped frame that snaps at the temple could make IXI unusable. What happens if the lens comes loose? What about extreme conditions we haven’t thought of yet?
For each scenario, we work out whether we can prevent it, detect it, or at least make sure nothing dangerous happens. The goal is that no matter what goes wrong, the user is always safe.
Q: And then there's the radio frequency testing?
A: Yeah, every wireless device has to play nicely with what's around it. IXI can't mess with your phone, and your phone can't mess with IXI. So we send it to a specialist lab in Oulu where they do their best to knock it offline. Actively transmitting interference. Trying to break the Bluetooth connection.
Basically, we try and push them off frequency, disrupt the connection in every way we can think of. If IXI survives Oulu, it’ll survive anything in the real world.
