Gunter Schneider, founder and president of Schneider, shares the latest lens manufacturing technology innovations from Schneider Optical Machines at DigiCON 2026, held in July at the company’s facilities in Fronhausen and Marburg, Germany.
FRONHAUSEN, Germany—Schneider Optical Machines welcomed more than 250 industry professionals from 50 countries to DigiCON 2026, its customer and innovation event held in July at the company’s facilities in Fronhausen and Marburg, Germany. The three-day event brought together lens manufacturers, optical industry leaders and technology partners from across Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia, reinforcing DigiCON as one of the ophthalmic industry’s most significant technology showcases, the company said in an announcement.
“It is a great honor for us to welcome leading representatives of our industry from around the world to Marburg and Fronhausen,” said Gunter Schneider, founder and president of Schneider. “At the same time, it is a strong vote of confidence in what we are building.”
The focus of this year’s event was Schneider’s vision for “lights-off production”—an increasingly autonomous manufacturing environment capable of addressing some of the industry’s most pressing challenges, including labor shortages, rising production costs, greater product complexity and ever-shorter delivery expectations, the company said.
“The next stage of ophthalmic manufacturing will be defined by autonomous production,” said Gunter Schneider. “And artificial intelligence is the key enabler of this transformation. It enables manufacturing systems to continuously analyze, adapt and optimize production processes in real time. The result is higher throughput, greater consistency and less reliance on manual intervention.”
Schneider said its vision for next-generation ophthalmic manufacturing centers on its continuously evolving Modulo system. The fully integrated, end-to-end production platform combines surfacing, cleaning, coating and edging within a connected production architecture. It is designed to take a lens blank at one end and deliver a finished, edged progressive lens at the other with minimal manual intervention at any stage, according to the company.
What distinguishes the latest evolution of the Modulo system is the deep integration of AI-driven process optimization, Schneider said. Sensors continuously monitor quality parameters and process data across the production line—from warehousing and surfacing through cleaning, coating and edging. Based on this information, AI dynamically adjusts production parameters, the company said.
Historically, process times, tool lifetimes and consumable replacement intervals have been based on conservative assumptions designed to guarantee consistent results under all conditions. According to Schneider, real-time process monitoring and AI-driven decision-making now make dynamic optimization possible not only at the machine level, but also across entire production lines.
“Modulo AI enables higher throughput, eliminates bottlenecks and improves utilization of existing capacity without adding headcount. The savings and efficiencies we unlock this way are significant,” said Gunter Schneider. “Artificial intelligence will fundamentally transform industrial manufacturing. Our ambition is not merely to keep pace with that transformation, but to shape it.”
Among the most significant announcements at DigiCON 2026 was the world premiere of Schneider’s fully integrated inline coating solution. The company said that for the past two decades, incorporating hard coating, curing and anti-reflective coating directly into an automated surfacing line has been considered a major technical barrier because of physical complexity and sensitivity to environmental variables. As a result, coating has remained a separate production stage.
Schneider said its new inline coating system breaks with that model and adds a critical building block for fully autonomous production. Hard-coat application, thermal curing and AR coating are now fully embedded within the automated production flow, eliminating batching, transfer steps, manual handling and associated risks. The integration creates a single, connected production chain from blank to finished lens—a capability that redefines what a modern lens lab can look like, according to the company.
Schneider also introduced a new production solution for photochromic lenses that uses precision 3D inkjet technology to apply photochromic layers directly to lens surfaces. The announcement said, instead of printing the entire lens blank, the system prints only the final lens shape—the portion that ultimately ends up in the frame rather than the material removed during edging.
The company said the approach offers greater material efficiency and improved process control, adding that the process is designed to make photochromic lens production substantially more resource-efficient and economically accessible. The technology opens a path for a broader segment of the industry to bring photochromic production in-house while providing greater flexibility in production planning and inventory management, they said.
A third world premiere, Modulo ZERO, addresses one of the industry’s persistent challenges in high-speed lens surfacing: alloy-free blocking. Schneider’s hybrid linking technology offers an alternative to traditional alloy blocking by combining vacuum-based fixation with a flexible, adaptable base that supports the lens during surfacing. According to the company, the result is a simplified production workflow that reduces environmental impact.
Schneider advised that the technology has also been engineered to be compatible with existing production environments, allowing laboratories to implement the system without extensive modifications to installed manufacturing infrastructure.
In addition to its world premieres, Schneider showcased several advancements across its Modulo portfolio, further strengthening its vision of fully integrated, high-performance ophthalmic manufacturing, they said.
The company unveiled a new fully automated warehousing system developed specifically for ophthalmic manufacturing. Deeply integrated into the Modulo production environment, Schneider said the highly configurable system supports storage heights of up to 6 meters, enables simultaneous storage and retrieval operations for maximum throughput, and provides a scalable platform that can grow with customers’ production requirements.
Schneider also introduced the Modulo Center One Pro, the latest evolution of its all-in-one surfacing concept. The system integrates milling, turning, laser marking, polishing and washing into a single compact production center. According to the company, the new system increases throughput by up to 40 percent while maintaining the small footprint that has made the Modulo Center a preferred solution for laboratories of all sizes.
Completing the portfolio, Schneider presented the HSE Modulo One, its next-generation high-performance edging system. The company said the new platform combines high throughput with an exceptionally compact footprint. New capabilities, including Hydro-F technology for reliable processing of superhydrophobic lenses, further expand production flexibility, while integrated quality control combines edging and inspection within a single platform.
Taken together, the innovations presented at DigiCON 2026 represent a unified vision for lens manufacturing, the company said, adding operations that are more autonomous, more integrated, less dependent on manual intervention and better equipped to adapt dynamically to changing production conditions while reducing environmental impact.
