Focus

Inspiration

The prevalence of people with refractive error in their eye is high in the US. Most people who have refractive errors exhibit myopia or hyperopia. Astigmatism and spherical aberration are also among the popular refractive errors. High order aberrations also show a significant effect based on a meta-analysis. Traditional corrective intervention such as eyeglasses and contact lens have limitations on correcting the higher-order aberrations.

Light-field display shows many promises recently on implementing a virtual 3D image on a 2D light-field display. Computational imaging has breakthroughs for visual correction applications recently by using parallax display which is a form of light-field display. However, there is a void in the consumer market for a vision correction display for people with refractive errors,

What it does

We designed a package that can let consumers self-evaluate their eyesight conditions including focusing issues, spherical aberration, astigmatism, and high order aberrations interactively. After the evaluation, the display adapts to the current user profile and automatically correct the visual on the display. The user can also update the profile by repeated self-evaluation.

The light-field display uses an emissive layer of pixels and a second matrix of LCD laminated on an acrylic spacer on top of the emissive layer. The matrix of the LCD selectively limits the emissive profile of each emissive cluster of pixels, much like a pinhole imaging formation. The manipulation enables the display to form a virtual image either in the display or above the display, relieving the stress and limited ability of the revolving motion of the eye.

Challenges we ran into

Cost of the entire unit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A novel implementation of a recent scientific breakthrough.

References

PAMPLONA, V. F., MOHAN, A., OLIVEIRA, M. M., AND RASKAR, R. 2010. Netra: interactive display for estimating refractive errors and focal range. ACM Trans. Graph. (SIGGRAPH) 29, 77:1–77:8. PAMPLONA, V. F., PASSOS, E. B., ZIZKA, J., OLIVEIRA, M. M., LAWSON, E., CLUA, E., AND RASKAR, R. 2011. Catra: interactive measuring and modeling of cataracts. ACM Trans. Graph. (SIGGRAPH) 30, 4, 47:1–47:8. PAMPLONA, V., OLIVEIRA, M., ALIAGA, D., AND RASKAR, R.

Tailored displays to compensate for visual aberrations. ACM Trans. Graph. (SIGGRAPH) 31. Vitor F. Pamplona, Ankit Mohan, Manuel M. Oliveira, and Ramesh Raskar. 2010. NETRA: interactive display for estimating refractive errors and focal range. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 papers (SIGGRAPH '10), Hugues Hoppe (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 77 , 8 pages. Eyeglasses-free Display: Towards Correcting Visual Aberrations with Computational Light Field Displays Fu-Chung Huang1,4 Gordon Wetzstein2 Brian A. Barsky1,3 Ramesh Raskar2 1Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley 2MIT Media Lab 3School of Optometry, UC Berkeley 4Microsoft Corporation Tailored Displays to Compensate for Visual Aberrations Vitor F. Pamplona1 Manuel M. Oliveira1 Daniel G. Aliaga2 Ramesh Raskar3 Instituto de Informatica - UFRGS ´ 2Purdue University 3Camera Culture Group - MIT Media Lab Analysis of Higher-Order Aberrations in a Large Clinical Population Andreas Hartwig; David A. Atchison