Optical design software · alpha

The copilot proposes.
The engine disposes.

Vergence is a lens design platform where the AI never does the arithmetic. It proposes; a deterministic ray-trace engine decides. The lens below is being traced, not illustrated.

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A live ray trace through the reference lens

meridional trace · axial and field bundles · F, d and C 8.0°
50.022 mm
effective focal length
F/5.00
working f-number
4.97 µm
rms spot · on axis
9.03 µm
rms spot · at field

these polylines and these four numbers came out of the Vergence engine and are committed to the repository · a test fails when they stop matching a live run

Language models cannot do arithmetic.
So we never let them.

The copilot reads your system, searches design space and proposes changes — the work it is genuinely good at. It is never the source of a number. Focal length, F-number, RMS wavefront, distortion, yield: each one comes from a trace you can open, rerun and export. If the engine did not compute it, the copilot does not say it.

That boundary is not a promise in a prompt. It is where the code is cut.

  1. S1 describe

    Say it, or hand it a patent.

    Ask in the language you would use with a colleague. Or drop in a patent PDF and let the extractor read the prescription tables — scans included.

    a fast triplet for the visible, distortion under one percent
    propose_merit_function

  2. S2 trace

    The engine builds it and traces it.

    Real catalog glass with the right dispersion fit, real apertures, real conjugates. Nothing is approximated to make a picture come out.

    F2 · resolved to schott, not cdgm
    nd 1.62004 · Vd 36.37 · in band

  3. S3 verify

    Nothing reaches you unchecked.

    A deterministic verifier rebuilds what was extracted and compares it against what the document claims about itself. What survives is citable. What does not is refused, out loud.

    stated focal length · rebuilt and compared
    stated f-number · rebuilt and compared
    disposition ACCEPT · nothing left unchecked

Verified import

We tell you when we cannot reproduce a lens.

Hand Vergence a patent and it reads the prescription, rebuilds the system and checks it against what the document claims about itself. Across 82 embodiments, this is the honest result — and the number that matters most is the last one.

20
accept

Rebuilt, traced, and agreeing with everything the document states about itself.

17
flagged

Built, but something disagrees or nothing was left to check it against. A person decides, with the reason on screen.

45
reject

The claim could not be reproduced. You are told, and nothing is handed to you as a design.

Why the refusals were refused

  • the rebuilt lens disagreed with a quantity the document states 26
  • the prescription as printed would not trace 17
  • no embodiment could be read from the document at all 6

Bad lenses accepted: zero. Every disposition above is machine-readable and carries its own reason, produced by tools/verify_run.py.

Evidence

The measured column.

Every figure here exists in the repository and was produced by a command that can be run again. Nothing on this page is an estimate, and nothing here is a number we would not show you the source of.

What was measured, and what produced it Result
First-order agreement with OpticStudio, 33 clean refractive designs tools/opticstudio_check.py 0.0074 %
Tolerance sensitivity against the closed form df/dR₁ app/tolerancing/sensitivity.py 0.0351 %
Monte Carlo σ against the closed form app/tolerancing/montecarlo.py 0.3584 %
Every analysis over every corpus design, 105 of them tools/parity_sweep.py 1785 runs · 0 fail · 0 crash
Zemax .zmx files imported, none failing tools/import_sweep.py 100 / 100 · 60 clean · 40 reported
Export round trip across the corpus tools/roundtrip_sweep.py 95 exact · 10 reported · 0 silent drift

Not yet proven: an independent Zemax column measured by a third party, design by design. It is in progress and we will publish it whole — including the rows where we lose.

Platform

The whole design loop, in a browser tab.

No licence server, no dongle, no workstation. The same rigour, on the machine you already have.

Design and optimize
Local and global search over a merit function you write and inspect, with real catalog glass and discrete glass substitution.
25 merit-function operands
Analyze
Spot, wavefront, MTF, distortion, field curvature, colour, illumination, encircled energy, and Seidel attribution per surface.
20 analyses in the registry
Tolerance
Deterministic sensitivity that names the surface and the parameter costing you most, then Monte Carlo yield over thousands of perturbed builds.
6 tolerance types
Report
A prescription report computed on the server, where every value is assembled from an engine call and nothing is calculated in the document itself.
Interop
Import and export Zemax .zmx, with a translation report that names anything it could not carry across rather than quietly dropping it.
1989 glasses in the catalog
Copilot
Reads your system, proposes changes behind an approval gate, and applies nothing you have not seen as a diff first.
34 copilot tools

Who it is for

Built for people who will check.

Thermal and IR

Germanium, silicon, zinc selenide and the chalcogenides resolved to the fit their vendor published — and refused, by name, outside the band that fit covers.

Machine vision

Compact imaging lenses from a spec to a toleranced prescription, with a yield number you can hand to a supplier.

Students

The workflow professionals use, at a price a lab course can carry, with a copilot that shows its working.

Research labs

Fast iteration on one-off instruments, and reports whose numbers you can put in a paper and defend.

The image plane

Trace something true.

The alpha is small and invite-only while we widen it carefully. Leave an address and we will tell you when there is room.

no newsletter, no sharing — one message when a seat opens