ARINSCO OPTICS
Meet the Cape Coral company’s founder, advancing the wow factor
Meet the Cape Coral company’s founder, advancing the wow factor
They’ve been around for decades, but 3-D glasses are evolving. A Cape Coral company has ambitious plans to make 3-D viewing both affordable and something we do at home. Arinsco Optics has introduced its C3D glasses, devices that give the wearer the sensation of looking through a window at what’s on the other side, says the company’s founder, Les Hardison, a career engineer with some 50 patents, mostly in the petroleum industry. The noncorrective glasses, which run $25, are suggested for video gaming, computer use and television viewing, says Hardison, who in retirement decided Florida golf was great but not enough to satisfy his curiosity about questions that long puzzled him as an engineer.
Hardison considers his glasses an evolution in technology that dates to the mid-19th century when inventors were unveiling their so-called stereoscopic devices, which used red and green lenses to change the depth perception of the viewer observing a still picture. Later technology gave the same effect to motion pictures, with theatergoers in 3-D glasses ducking to avoid the high kicks of dancers on the screen, for example.
Details are at arinscooptics.com, 239-257-2312.
Cape Coral Living magazine asked Les Hardison about his career and the glasses he hopes will change the way we view media.
I WAS BORN …
in Chicago in 1929, when times were good. But the times went away before I learned to walk and talk or remember. My childhood left me with a strong desire to be able to earn a living doing something people needed to be done. I liked figuring out how things worked, mechanically. Becoming an engineer seemed to be the natural course for me, from grade school on. I went to Tilden Technical High School and got a degree in mechanical engineering from IIT [Illinois Institute of Technology] in 1950. In addition to all the introductory science classes, physics and math were the most intriguing courses. Both involve the “laws of nature,” which I learned were written
by men and women, and not by nature. They were attempts to describe how things work, which was right up my alley. I HAD A …
satisfying career, working for several good companies, the last of which was Universal Oil Products, where among other jobs I was a process design engineer, working on the design of many of the oil-refining processes used to produce gasoline, fuel oil, plastics and so on. The last 25 years were spent running my own engineering/construction company [ARI Technologies]. These were all very satisfying jobs, and I was able to contribute to several new concepts. Over the years, I was granted more than 50 U.S. patents.
THINGS WORKED …
out well for me, both careerwise and personally. After I retired in 1994, I thought it would be hard to fill up the hours I had spent working, but that didn’t prove to be the case. I had time to do all sorts of things I wanted to do, like play golf, but more importantly, I had time to think about things that puzzled me during my education.
IN PARTICULAR …
one of those things dealt with the velocity of light. It didn’t make sense to me that whatever limited the speed of light also limited the speed of a spaceship or a missile. I wound up figuring out an alternative to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, in which the speed of light is infinite. I have written three books explaining this theory. They are, apparently, regarded as heresy by most physicists, as I have not found any way of “proving” my system superior to relativity other than common sense.
I ALSO GAVE …
a lot of thought to how we perceive light, if it is not by receiving electromagnetic radiation, as Einstein believed. And how we perceive a picture of the threedimensional world we live in when the retinas of our eyes show our brains two 2-D pictures taken from slightly different angles. The result of this line of thought was 3-D glasses, which don’t prove my theory, but do make watching football on TV more like actually being there.