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. We also used to use the services of Shilton Accounting Services, who helped us with our accounts.
The company registration details are:
Company Registration No. 7680065
VAT Registration No. GB132 2934 35