REAL LIFE NEWS: SCREENS THAT ADAPT TO CORRECT YOUR EYESIGHT
by Hazed
Continuing my trawl through back issues of New Scientist, I am now less than a month in arrears. I may soon catch up!
In the issue dated August 9, I found a snippet of news that intrigued me. A short paragraph said that MIT Media Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley have developed screens that will adjust to cater for bad eyesight. Given that my eyes have deteriorated with age, and I often have trouble reading text on my phone’s screen, I was intrigued so I asked Mr Google to tell me more.
I found the original announcement on MIT’s website which gave me more details (see source link below).
The idea is explained succinctly by one of the MIT research scientists, Gordon Wetzstein. Rather than wearing glasses on your head, he says, their solution puts the glasses onto the display. Given how much time we spend interacting with computers and gadgets displaying digital information, this could make life a lot easier for those who don’t have perfect vision.
A vision defect happens when the eye’s focal distance – that is, the range at which it can bring objects into focus – does not match the distance of the object it is trying to focus on. The new display corrects this by simulating an image at the correct focal distance. It combines multiple pixels into a single, virtual pixel that appears to be closer or further away than the actual screen.
The team who have developed this idea planned to present it in a paper at Siggraph, the premier graphics conference, last month. Presumably by now this has happened!
I really do hope this technology is developed, because it would make my life so much easier.
Source: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/new-display-technology-automatically-corrects-for-vision-defects-0731
