They look like an ordinary pair of glasses – but these are tech-packed specs.

On a Zoom call, Niko Eiden, chief executive and co-founder of Finnish eyewear firm IXI, holds up the frames with lenses containing liquid crystals, meaning their vision-correcting properties can change on the fly.

This one pair could correct the vision of someone who normally uses totally different pairs of glasses for seeing near or far.

“These liquid crystals… we can rotate them with an electrical field,” explains Mr Eiden.

“It’s totally, freely tuneable.” The position of those crystals affects the passage of light through the lenses. A built-in eye-tracker allows the glasses to respond to whatever correction the wearer needs at a given moment.

However, tech-laden eyewear has a troubled history – take Google’s ill-fated “Glass” smart glasses.

Consumer acceptability is key, acknowledges Mr Eiden. Most people don’t want to look like cyborgs: “We need to make our products actually look like existing eyewear.”

The market for eyewear tech is likely to grow.

Presbyopia, an age-related condition that makes it harder to focus on things close to you, is projected to become more common over time as the world’s population ages. And myopia, or short-sightedness, is also on the rise.

Spectacles have remained largely the same for decades. Bifocal lenses – in which a lens is split into two regions, usually for either near- or far-sightedness – require the wearer to direct their vision through the relevant region, depending on what they want to look at, in order to see clearly.

Varifocals do a similar job but the transitions are much smoother.

In contrast, auto-focus lenses promise to adjust part or all of the lens spontaneously, and even accommodate the wearer’s changing eyesight over time.

“The first lenses that we produced were horrible,” admits Mr Eiden, candidly.

Those early prototypes were “hazy”, he says, and with the lens quality noticeably poor at its edges.

But newer versions have proved promising in tests, says Mr Eiden. Participants in the company’s trials have been asked, for example, to read something on a page, then look at an object in the distance, to see whether the glasses respond smoothly to the transition.

Mr Eiden says that the eye tracking device within the spectacles cannot determine exactly what a wearer is looking at, though certain activities such as reading are in principle detectable because of the nature of eye movements associated with them.

Since such glasses respond so closely to the wearer’s eye behaviour, it’s important the frames fit well, says Emilia Helin, product director.

IXI’s frames are adjustable but not to a great degree, given the delicate electronics inside, she explains: “We have some flexibility but not full flexibility.” That’s why IXI hopes to ensure that the small range of frames it has designed would suit a wide variety of faces.

The small battery secreted inside IXI’s autofocus frames should last for two days, says Mr Eiden, adding that it’s possible to recharge the specs overnight while the wearer is asleep.

But he won’t be drawn on a launch date, which he intends to reveal later this year. As for cost, I ask whether £1,000 might be the sort of price tag he has in mind. He merely says, “I’m smiling when you say it but I won’t confirm.”

Autofocus lenses could help people who struggle with varifocals or bifocals, says Paramdeep Bilkhu, clinical adviser at the College of Optometrists.

However, he adds, “There is insufficient evidence to state whether they perform as well as traditional options and whether they can be used for safety critical tasks such as driving.”

Chi-Ho To, an optometry researcher, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University has a similar concern – what if the vision correction went wrong or was delayed slightly while he was, say, performing surgery on someone?

“But I think in terms of general use having something that allows autofocusing is a good idea,” he adds.

Mr Eiden notes that the first version of his company’s lenses will not alter the entire lens area. “One can always glance over the dynamic area,” he says. If wholly self-adjusting lenses emerge then safety will become “a much more serious business”, he adds.

In 2013, UK firm Adlens released glasses that allowed wearers to manually change the optical power of the lenses via a small dial on the frames. These lenses contained a fluid-filled membrane, which when compressed in response to dial adjustments would alter its curvature.

Adlens’ current chief executive Rob Stevens says the specs sold for $1,250 (£920) in the US and were “well received by consumers” but not so much by opticians, which he says “strangled sales”.

Since then, technology has moved on and the concept of lenses that refocus themselves automatically, without manual interventions, has emerged.

Like IXI and other companies, Adlens is working on glasses that do this. However, Mr Stevens declines to confirm a launch date.

Joshua Silver, an Oxford University physicist, founded Adlens but no longer works for the company.

He came up with the idea of fluid-filled adjustable lenses back in 1985 and developed glasses that could be tuned to the wearer’s needs and then permanently set to that prescription.

Such lenses have enabled roughly 100,000 people in 20 countries to access vision correcting technology. Prof Silver is currently seeking investment for a venture called Vision, which would further rollout these glasses.

As for more expensive, electronics-filled auto-focus specs, he questions whether they will have broad appeal: “Wouldn’t [people] just go and buy reading glasses, which would more or less do the same thing for them?”

Other specs tech is even slowing down the progression of eye conditions such as myopia, beyond just correcting for them.

Prof To has developed glasses lenses that have a honeycomb-like ring in them. Light passing through the centre of the ring, focused as normal, reaches the wearer’s retina and allows them to see clearly.

However, light passing through the ring itself is defocused slightly meaning that the peripheral retina gets a slightly blurred image.

This appears to slow improper eyeball growth in children, which Prof To says cuts the rate of short-sightedness progression by 60%. Glasses with this technology are now in use in more than 30 countries, he adds.

British firm SightGlass has a slightly different approach – glasses that gently reduce the contrast of someone’s vision to similarly affect eye growth and myopia progression.

While autofocus glasses and other high-tech solutions may have promise, Prof To has an even bigger goal: glasses that don’t just slow down myopia but actually reverse it slightly – a tantalising prospect that could improve the vision of potentially billions of people.

“There is growing evidence that you can do it,” teases Prof To.

When Beverly Morris retired in 2016, she thought she had found her dream home – a peaceful stretch of rural Georgia, surrounded by trees and quiet.

Today, it’s anything but.

Just 400 yards (366m) from her front porch in Mansfield, Georgia, sits a large, windowless building filled with servers, cables, and blinking lights.

It’s a data centre – one of many popping up across small-town America, and around the globe, to power everything from online banking to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

“I can’t live in my home with half of my home functioning and no water,” Ms Morris says. “I can’t drink the water.”

She believes the construction of the centre, which is owned by Meta (the parent company of Facebook), disrupted her private well, causing an excessive build-up of sediment. Ms Morris now hauls water in buckets to flush her toilet.

She says she had to fix the plumbing in her kitchen to restore water pressure. But the water that comes of the tap still has residue in it.

“I’m afraid to drink the water, but I still cook with it, and brush my teeth with it,” says Morris. “Am I worried about it? Yes.”

Meta, however, says the two aren’t connected.

In a statement to the BBC, Meta said that “being a good neighbour is a priority”.

The company commissioned an independent groundwater study to investigate Morris’s concerns. According to the report, its data centre operation did “not adversely affect groundwater conditions in the area”.

While Meta disputes that it has caused the problems with Ms Morris’ water, there’s no doubt, in her estimation, that the company has worn out its welcome as her neighbour.

“This was my perfect spot,” she says. “But it isn’t anymore.”

We tend to think of the cloud as something invisible – floating above us in the digital ether. But the reality is very physical.

The cloud lives in over 10,000 data centres around the world, most of them located in the US, followed by the UK and Germany.

With AI now driving a surge in online activity, that number is growing fast. And with them, more complaints from nearby residents.

The US boom is being challenged by a rise in local activism – with $64bn (£47bn) in projects delayed or blocked nationwide, according to a report from pressure group Data Center Watch.

And the concerns aren’t just about construction. It’s also about water usage. Keeping those servers cool requires a lot of water.

“These are very hot processors,” Mark Mills of the National Center for Energy Analytics testified before Congress back in April. “It takes a lot of water to cool them down.”

Many centres use evaporative cooling systems, where water absorbs heat and evaporates – similar to how sweat wicks away heat from our bodies. On hot days, a single facility can use millions of gallons.

One study estimates that AI-driven data centres could consume 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally by 2027.

Few places illustrate this tension more clearly than Georgia – one of the fastest-growing data centre markets in the US.

Its humid climate provides a natural and more cost-effective source of water for cooling data centres, making it attractive to developers. But that abundance may come at a cost.

Gordon Rogers is the executive director of Flint Riverkeeper, a non-profit advocacy group that monitors the health of Georgia’s Flint River. He takes us to a creek downhill from a new construction site for a data centre being built by US firm Quality Technology Services (QTS).

George Dietz, a local volunteer, scoops up a sample of the water into a clear plastic bag. It’s cloudy and brown.

“It shouldn’t be that colour,” he says. To him, this suggests sediment runoff – and possibly flocculants. These are chemicals used in construction to bind soil and prevent erosion, but if they escape into the water system, they can create sludge.

QTS says its data centres meet high environmental standards and bring millions in local tax revenue.

While construction is often carried out by third-party contractors, local residents are the ones left to deal with the consequences.

“They shouldn’t be doing it,” Mr Rogers says. “A larger wealthier property owner does not have more property rights than a smaller, less wealthy property owner.”

Tech giants say they are aware of the issues and are taking action.

“Our goal is that by 2030, we’ll be putting more water back into the watersheds and communities where we’re operating data centres, than we’re taking out,” says Will Hewes, global water stewardship lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which runs more data centres than any other company globally.

He says AWS is investing in projects like leak repairs, rainwater harvesting, and using treated wastewater for cooling. In Virginia, the company is working with farmers to reduce nutrient pollution in Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the US.

In South Africa and India – where AWS doesn’t use water for cooling – the company is still investing in water access and quality initiatives.

In the Americas, Mr Hewes says, water is only used on about 10% of the hottest days each year.

Still, the numbers add up. A single AI query – for example, a request to ChatGPT – can use about as much water as a small bottle you’d buy from the corner shop. Multiply that by billions of queries a day, and the scale becomes clear.

Prof Rajiv Garg teaches cloud computing at Emory University in Atlanta. He says these data centres aren’t going away – if anything, they’re becoming the backbone of modern life.

“There’s no turning back,” Prof Garg says.

But there is a path forward. The key, he argues, is long-term thinking: smarter cooling systems, rainwater harvesting, and more efficient infrastructure.

In the short term, data centres will create “a huge strain”, he admits. But the industry is starting to shift toward sustainability.

And yet, that’s little consolation to homeowners like Beverly Morris – stuck between yesterday’s dream and tomorrow’s infrastructure.

Data centres have become more than just an industry trend – they’re now part of national policy. President Donald Trump recently vowed to build the largest AI infrastructure project in history, calling it “a future powered by American data”.

Back in Georgia, the sun beats down through thick humidity – a reminder of why the state is so attractive to data centre developers.

For locals, the future of tech is already here. And it’s loud, thirsty, and sometimes hard to live next to.

As AI grows, the challenge is clear: how to power tomorrow’s digital world without draining the most basic resource of all – water.

Correction: This article originally said that Beverly Morris lives in Fayette County, Georgia, and has been amended to explain that she lives in Mansfield, Georgia.

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