About Us

We are a small company based in Oxfordshire which started up in June 2011 to meet the needs of people who wear glasses whilst watching 3D films in cinemas and who do not like wearing two pairs of glasses.  We are a husband and wife team, Colin and Frances-Mary Pratt and Colin has a Facebook page, but to summarise, he is a polymer chemist by training. He left Fullbrook School in 1988 with 3 A-levels in chemistry, maths and physics. He then studied chemistry at Leicester University but unfortunately, he failed his second year exams and re-sits and so he left. Six months later he landed a job at OMI-Imisa, now part of the Vesuvius group, in the customer service laboratory. Whilst he worked there he did a part time degree at Kingston University for 5 years achieving a second class (lower division) degree in 1997. During this time Colin had been promoted to the quality control laboratory and the company name had changed to Enthone-OMI. He left his job at the end of October, 1998 to study a Ph.D. In Conducting Polymers at Kingston University with Professor Peter Foot. The Ph.D. was titled ‘The Effect of Metal Ions on the Synthesis and Properties of Conducting Polymers’. He completed this in November 2003, three days before his birthday. He did a postdoc on intraocular lenses for five months in 2004. Otherwise, Colin worked as a temporary software tester for Electronic Arts from May 2003 until 2008 when he obtained a position at the University of Reading as a Knowledge Transfer Associate. This involved working with Johnstone Safety Products (JSP) Ltd on a project to make the bases of traffic cones more cheaply using recycled materials. During this time he acquired a CMI diploma in Management and Leadership. He successfully completed the project in 2010 which should save JSP about £100k per year. It was in 2011 that, with his wife Frances-Mary, he started Optics 3D Ltd. He enjoys board and role playing games, likes cycling and badminton and enjoys science and science fiction TV shows and films.

Born, brought up and educated in Surrey, Frances-Mary (FM) has had training in business administration and has interests in Enid Blyton and Biggles books, Thunderbirds, sailing and singing. She suffers from Asperger's Syndrome and she is currently writing a book on her life with this condition. We plan to start a publishing company at some point to be called Pratt’s Publishing, to publish this book and others which she has written. Colin plays badminton, swims and body surfs, which FM used to do, but cannot anymore due to a leg problem. We first met at a Scrabble club and we still often play Scrabble together.

We came up with the idea of prescription 3D glasses back at Christmas 2009 after watching A Christmas Carol, Frances-Mary complained how uncomfortable it was wearing two pairs of glasses and Colin agreed. We searched in vain for prescription 3D glasses and found none. No-body had heard of them but many said that it was a good idea. At the time Colin was too busy on a knowledge transfer partnership project with the University of Reading and JSP to do anything about it. However, upon completion of the project we remembered our idea and it was still clear that no one was producing prescription 3D glasses. In March and April, research was conducted to determine the best method of producing prescription 3D glasses. A prototype was made using Fimo, a type of clay, tested and was found to work perfectly. Colin drew up some possible designs and then contacted Agentdraw, a design house and manufacturing company. They said that they could modify the design to make it easier to manufacture and manufacture them for us. At the same time, a survey was drawn up and put online on myfreesurveys.com. The survey results suggested that there is indeed a market for prescription 3D glasses. We did further research and we found that it would be much cheaper to use existing designs of sunglasses as 3D glasses and to use an insert which holds the prescription lenses. We also found a design of glasses with interchangeable lenses made by the Italian fashion house, Nannini. As there are a number of different 3D systems used in the various cinemas, we felt this feature would be very useful and these frames are used for our RxMulti3D glasses. We found a supplier of polarisers in China. Based in Xiamen, Eyepol PolarizingTechnology offered, in addition to polarisers, to supply suitable frames for our RxMono3D product and on more favourable terms than Agentdraw. Our prescription lenses will be supplied by Norville, who are a supplier to opticians. As we are neither optometrists nor ophthalmologists,Norville deal with that side of the business. When a customer enters their prescription details to our online order form, we will pass this on to Norville who will make the lenses to order. Our website was developed by Websites by Mark, who used to be based locally to us.

The company registration details are:

Company Registration No. 7680065                                                       VAT Registration No. GB132 2934 35