You can already pull pupillary distance from a single photo of a customer holding a credit card. But segment height has always carried an asterisk: it only works if the customer is already wearing a frame in that photo. For anyone selling prescription lenses online or fitting customers who are not in the room, that asterisk is the whole problem. The buyer has not received the frame yet, so there is nothing on their face to measure against. We have been building a way around it, and it is close.
Why fitting height has been the holdout
Pupillary distance is a measurement between two points on the face, the centers of the pupils, so it can be read from any properly calibrated photo. Segment height is a different kind of measurement. It runs from the pupil center down to the bottom of the lens, and the bottom of the lens only exists once a real frame is sitting on the face.
In a remote sale, the customer is photographed before the frame ships, so that lower reference simply is not there. That single missing anchor is why remote dispensing has been stuck measuring PD from home while fitting height still meant a store visit, a mailed-back try-on photo, or an educated guess.
Bringing the frame into the photo
Here is the part we are excited about. You will not need the glasses on the customer’s face to measure as if they were. Optogrid is learning to bring the exact frame your customer is buying into their measurement photo, so you can place it where it will actually sit and read the fitting height straight from the picture. The customer never has to wear it, and you are working from the real frame they ordered, not a generic stand-in.
Not just fitting height
It does not stop at height. The same flow is built to hand you the rest of the numbers a lab needs to cut the lens correctly, the dispensing measurements that usually come last, so a remote order can be completed in full instead of half-finished. If you want a refresher on one of them, our minimum blank size guide and MBS calculator already walk through the math.
Built for the online and remote sale
This is aimed squarely at shops that sell online or measure customers at a distance. The goal is the whole fitting in one place, captured from a single photo taken at the customer’s kitchen table, before the frame ever leaves your bench. It turns “we can measure most of it remotely” into a complete remote fitting workflow that ends in a correct lens, not a remake.
Coming soon
We are in active development and piloting this with opticians now, refining it before a wider release. If you fit progressives for online or remote customers and want to be among the first to try it, or help shape how it works, email us at [email protected] to book a demo.
I am a seasoned software engineer with over two decades of experience and a deep-rooted background in the optical industry, thanks to a family business. Driven by a passion for developing impactful software solutions, I pride myself on being a dedicated problem solver who strives to transform challenges into opportunities for innovation.