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Seawiscope
Designed by Divers for Divers

Seawiscope is dedicated to small items and devices, especially related to vision, for scuba diving. Our director is a licensed optometrist and taught optics in a university for over 20 years. He has been an amateur diver for over 15 years. Vision is our business and hobby.

We are committed to provide high quality devices/aids for divers to get the most out of each dive.

Our current series include:
♠ SeawiscopeEY : A diver's aid for near vision
♠ SeawiscopeMW : An underwater magnifying viewing tube
♠ SeawiscopeHB : A simple aid to keep your dive buddy always in sight
♠ SeawiscopeSR : A lanyard to keep your eyewear next to skin, on dry land or in water
♠ SeawiscopeWL : A lanyard for small cameras, mobile phones or other small devices for out-door activities


Story of Seawiscope
I started the fun of scuba diving in the mid-thirty. As years went by, I gradually ran into troubles of reading my Aladdin and had to switch back to standard diving gauges. Then again, I needed to do a lot of guessing work for my gauges lately.

I also realized I had been turning blind eyes to small creature of all kinds for quite sometime. I was not able to see details of most nudibranchs, no coral shrimps or spider crabs. How I wished to see the "feathers" in a christmas-tree or coco worm.

Being an optometrist, I understand that my near vision creepingly fails with coming of age. It is of no big deal and there are solutions.

I tried out a number of options:
  • Cut out two small pieces of reading-prescription lenses and cemented them onto the mask window. They are the so-called bifocals, or half-lenses, in standard spectacles.
  • Incorporated my habitual bifocal spectacles behind the dive mask window.
  • Acquired a pair of small flexible plastic lenses and stuck onto the back of the mask window. These lenses are available in a number of dive shops in town.
  • Under-corrected left eye shortsightedness (effectively using my left eye near prescription) in the mask window. I could then use my right eye for distant vision and left eye for near.

    This is generally known as "monovision", a common compromised alternative in avoiding reading glasses, especially for those who went through lasik, or laser surgery to correct shortsightedness.
 Masks with bifocals
All these alternatives appeared to be working alright. I could read my dive computer, although I was not doing too well with my camera LCD monitor.



Then it came to my total frustration. In Puerto Galera (Philippines), I was led by a dive master to a large sea-fan coral. He wanted to show off their pigmy seahorses. Sorry to the poor dive master who tried so hard to pin down his pigmies with all sort of gestures, but all in vain. With the near aids, which I thought was working alright, I found no way to spot onto such a small creature among the sea-fan branches. Besides, the near lenses are small and sitting in the lower half of the mask window. One needs to acquire very uncomfortable head postures to see near objects right upfront.

So, a true near vision aid for divers has yet available.

Existing near aids that partition distant and near vision give a small near vision area in an odd position. Divers need to tilt head around to search for the little lens to see their gauges. Using this small bottom lens segment to search and examine fine details is basically out of questions. To most people, "monovision" is difficult to adapt to and does not usually give good visual concentration. Furthermore, fine details a diver needs to check out are much smaller than prints in a bible. To see better, one needs to work at a much closer distance.

I rolled up my sleeves to work for a near vision aid truly for divers: the SeawiscopeEverYoung. I called it Ever Young because, with it, I am replenished with all the fun (and safety) of scuba diving that I missed out for a long, long time. 		Pigmy Seahorse

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