The Optician2020 is the new project for Flexible and on-demand manufacturing of customised spectacles by close-to-optician production clusters, a 3-years-project co-funded by the European Commission within the Factories of the Future initiative of the 7th Framework Programme.

Spectacles are a fashionable product combining health prescription, functional performance and aesthetical requirements. The 2020 ophthalmic industry paradigm will be that fully personalised spectacles are manufactured at dedicated optics local workshops based on the refractive prescription and the customer’s anatomical data and their fashion preferences.

For a large variety of products, the use of innovative technologies of advanced manufacturing allows the total personalization, which provides end users with real added value. Customization strategies allow manufacturers and marketers to offer products unique to end-user specifications and build them from the ground up to a given person’s needs and desires.

With personalization the end-user of a product co-defines (participates in) the entire product provisioning process from beginning to end. On the contrary, mass customization, typically only provides some illusion of personalisation as it permits the creation of customized product variants by enabling end-users to further enhance a standard product with features and components selected from a pool of available pick-and-choose building blocks.