Wearing glasses with Gear VR can be the pits, this Kickstarter wants to fix it

The latest version of the Gear VR makes wearing glasses with the hardware a bit more comfortable, but it's still not ideal. It can take a bit of fiddling to get everything working together, and your glasses still sometimes bump and scrape against the lenses of the VR headset itself.

VR Cover, which designs and sells comfortable covers for VR headsets, recently launched VR Lens Lab and a new Kickstarter campaign. Both promise to add prescription lenses to the Gear VR so that you can ditch your glasses when using the device completely.

"The adapters are made from a semi-flexible rubber and can simply be put on top of the current lenses and they stay in place," VR Cover's Jay Uhdinger told Polygon. "You will not bump against them because luckily head-mounted display manufacturers leave space for regular glasses. Our adapters use this space more efficiently and just stand out by 3.5 mm... we can correct for things like astigmatism, add cylinders and prisms, just like what you would do for regular prescription lenses."

The ability to change the lenses for each eye offers many advantages. "One big benefit is if someone has for example a prescription of -1 on one eye and -3 on another eye," Uhdinger said. "The Gear VR adjustment can't fix this but with our lens adapters and lenses we can account for that, of course. For upcoming headsets the adapters will be moveable to account for IPD adjustments as well."

The Kickstarter video explains the product, and the problems it hopes to fix:

There are actually two products in action here, since prescription lenses are considered a medical device and thus can't be offered on Kickstarter.

You'll go to the website to order your prescription lenses, but during the campaign you'll order the adapters that allow your lenses to be used directly in the headset through Kickstarter. Once you have both pieces you put everything together and add the lenses to your existing Gear VR, and you're rewarded with a much more comfortable experience.

The price is also reasonable.

"We can cover all prescriptions from +10 dpt to -10 which should be good for about 90 percent of people who wear glasses with our standard prescription lens packages," Uhdinger said. "This means 9€ [$9.74 at the time of writing] for the adapter plus either 29€ [$42.19] for the standard coated prescription lenses or 39€ [$42.17] for the Blueguard VR coated ones."

If your needs are more specialized the company can help you, but you may pay a bit more. "We can also help people with other more extreme prescriptions, but they will have to get in touch and get a custom quote because we will need to use special lenses for them that cost more," Uhdinger explained.

So for around $52 total you can get prescription lenses with the Blueguard coating and the adapter that will completely eliminate the need to use your glasses inside the Gear VR. This is a no-brainer for people who use VR regularly, or for those who enjoy longer sessions.

While glasses are usable in the retail Gear VR they're not ideal, and the ability to use the Gear VR without either switching to contacts or squishing your glasses in there is certainly appealing. The company also said that they'll be creating options for future VR headsets such as the retail Oculus Rift.

If you want to get rid of your glasses while using the Gear VR, you can support the Kickstarter now, and will soon be able to order the prescription lenses after the campaign has finished.