Topology
Custom eyewear using Apple TrueDepth camera, $18M raised
The Problem
Most glasses don't fit most people. The industry's dirty secret is that standard frame sizing is designed around an average that describes almost nobody's actual face. Pupillary distance measurements done at point of sale are imprecise. Online eyewear purchases return at high rates because what looks right in a photo doesn't translate to how something feels on your face.
Topology was founded to solve this with hardware that already existed in every recent iPhone: the TrueDepth sensor that powers Face ID. The same system that projects 30,000 infrared dots to map your face for biometric authentication can take the medical-grade measurements needed for precisely fitted, custom-manufactured eyewear: pupillary distance, nose bridge geometry, temple angle, frame tilt. The company had raised $18M and had the technical infrastructure to manufacture truly bespoke glasses at consumer price points. The design challenge was getting a person to trust their phone enough to point it at their face and let it replace the optician.
The Work
I joined as the sole designer working directly with the CEO and CTO. The product existed in two forms: a consumer-facing iOS app for purchasing custom eyewear, and a clinical iPad application for use inside eye care practices by trained opticians. My job was to design both, manage the shared components between them, and navigate the significant tension between the two contexts.
The consumer app's central experience was the face scan. That flow had to accomplish several things simultaneously: instruct the user on how to hold the phone and position their face, build confidence that the technology was actually capturing useful data, handle the anxiety that comes with pointing a sensor at your face and trusting it to make a medical measurement, and recover gracefully from bad scans without making the user feel like they'd failed. The visual feedback during the scan (the indicator that the depth mapping was working, that the lighting was adequate, that the measurement was complete) required close collaboration with engineering to understand what the sensor could actually report in real time, then translating that into states the user could act on.
The virtual try-on experience sat downstream from the scan. Once we had a precise facial model, users could preview frames on their actual face geometry in AR. The design challenge here was photorealism versus performance: more realistic rendering required more compute, which introduced lag that broke the fluidity of browsing frames. The decision was to prioritize responsiveness over fidelity. A frame preview that updated instantly as you scrolled through options was more useful than one that was photorealistic but slow.
The clinical tool for opticians required a different vocabulary entirely. Accuracy and precision were the primary values, not delight. The optometrist interface surfaced the raw measurement data alongside the visual model, gave practitioners controls for manual adjustment, and documented the measurement session in a way that could be attached to a patient record. Consumer affordances (large touch targets, minimal text, celebratory moments) were stripped in favor of information density and auditability.
The Outcome
Topology went on to pivot toward B2B, becoming a SaaS platform for eyewear retailers and e-tailers, offering the same 3D scanning and virtual try-on infrastructure to the broader optical industry. The consumer app's design work became the proof-of-concept that the technology could translate from a clinical tool into something a consumer would willingly use. New Look Vision Group acquired an equity stake in the company and deployed the platform across retail locations in Canada. The company continues to operate as a platform business in the eyewear space.
