Maybe you’re not ready to admit you need reading glasses, but if you find yourself squinting at the display on your phone when you check it first thing in the morning, you may appreciate some new technology on the horizon.
Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley are developing a vision-correcting screen that automatically corrects for vision defects. The idea is that eventually you’ll be able to simply clip the display onto your phone, your tablet, your laptop, or even the GPS dashboard display in your car—no glasses or contact lenses required.
Many of us have refractive errors that affect our vision, and our choices are pretty much limited to glasses, contact lenses, or LASIK eye surgery. A computational display technology that predistorts the content displayed on a screen—essentially moving the glasses from our head to the screen—is intriguing.
However, the displays may eventually even be able to help people with more complex vision problems that cannot be corrected by eyeglasses. Brian Barsky, UC Berkeley professor of computer science and vision science and affiliate professor of optometry, said:
We now live in a world where displays are ubiquitous, and being able to interact with displays is taken for granted. People with higher order aberrations often have irregularities in the shape of the cornea, and this irregular shape makes it very difficult to have a contact lens that will fit. In some cases, this can be a barrier to holding certain jobs because many workers need to look at a screen as part of their work. This research could transform their lives, and I am passionate about that potential.
The researchers recently showed a prototype and presented a paper on the technology at the International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, or SIGGRAPH, in Vancouver, Canada.
Vision-correcting display technology is still probably several years away, so don’t throw away those Ben Franklin half-frame glasses yet. However, for a look at what’s in store, check out the video below.
