Three dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions are try­ing to pro­vide vision to the world. Britain’s AdSpecs has been at it for around 10 years, while two Dutch firms Focus on Vision and U-Specs are just get­ting started.

Each of the orga­ni­za­tions are attempt­ing to mass pro­duce glasses at a low enough cost that they can be dis­trib­uted to the poor around the world. The three groups use a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies that can change the focus of the lenses, so that wear­ers can auto focus the glasses with­out using an optometrist.

From the New York Times, writer Dou­glas Hein­gart­ner com­pares the three out­fits and the occa­sional com­pe­ti­tion to sup­ply vision to the world.

The tan­gled prove­nance of the designs demon­strates the unspo­ken yet occa­sion­ally pal­pa­ble sense of rivalry among the var­i­ous camps.

“I view them as good friends,” Pro­fes­sor Sil­ver, the inven­tor of AdSpecs, said. “We’re not com­peti­tors. I’m just rather keen on ori­gins and facts being clearly stated.”

He said they all agreed that the devel­op­ing world needed a “low-cost design that can be pro­duced at very high vol­ume,” con­ced­ing that “none of the enter­prises around today can do that.”

But each camp is con­vinced that it has the best approach to sup­ply the mil­lions or even bil­lions of inex­pen­sive glasses the devel­op­ing world needs.

Focus on Vision says its advan­tage is the unique injection-molding process that allows its Focusspec eye­glasses to be made cheaply. It was devel­oped by a Dutch engi­neer, Ron Kok, who grew wealthy in the 1980s by stream­lin­ing the man­u­fac­ture of com­pact discs and con­tact lenses.

Focus on Vision invited Mr. Kok to work that same magic on its glasses. “I saw imme­di­ately that you could make it sim­pler,” he said. “They’re designed to be easy and cheap to produce.”

The U-Specs team empha­sizes its sci­en­tific pedi­gree. “We took more of an aca­d­e­mic approach, or at least a sci­en­tific approach, rather than an entre­pre­neur­ial one,” said Sjo­erd Han­nema, who was in charge of the U-Specs project until the mid­dle of 2009. “Hav­ing a uni­ver­sity and an eye hos­pi­tal behind it,” he said, “helps build recog­ni­tion and author­ity around this project.”

Mr. Han­nema now leads a non­profit orga­ni­za­tion called Adap­tive Eye­wear, which is run­ning a dis­tri­b­u­tion project in Rwanda called Vision for a Nation. It uses a com­bi­na­tion of U-Specs, a ver­sion of Pro­fes­sor Silver’s lenses and tra­di­tional read­ing glasses.

Although they are not made using Mr. Kok’s spe­cial pro­duc­tion tech­nique, sup­port­ers of U-Specs say they will ulti­mately cost about the same to pro­duce as the Focusspec.

“It will be around one to two dol­lars, depend­ing on the quan­tity,” Mr. Han­nema said. “If you make a mil­lion glasses, then auto­mat­i­cally your cost price goes down dra­mat­i­cally. But then the chal­lenge is where are you going to bring those glasses? Ulti­mately the cost of dis­tri­b­u­tion is what matters.”

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