Internet users spend a lot of their day staring at a screen, so it’s no surprise that nearly all of us are blind without glasses or contact lenses. But wouldn’t it be great if we could give our eyes a break and just stare at the screen without the aid of corrective lenses? That’s the idea behind an experimental display that automatically adjusts itself to compensate for your lack of ocular prowess, enabling you to sit back and relax without eyewear. It works by placing a light-filtering screen in front of a regular LCD display that breaks down the picture in such a way that, when it reaches your eye, the light rays are reconstructed as a sharp image.
Those of us who need glasses to see a TV or laptop screen clearly could ditch the eyewear thanks to a display technology that corrects vision problems. The technology uses algorithms to alter an image based on a person’s glasses prescription together with a light filter set in front of the display. The algorithm alters the light from each individual pixel so that, when fed through a tiny hole in the plastic filter, rays of light reach the retina in a way that re-creates a sharp image. Researchers say the idea is to anticipate how your eyes will naturally distort whatever’s onscreen—something glasses or contacts typically correct—and adjust it beforehand so that what you see appears clear. Brian A. Barsky, a University of California, Berkeley, computer science professor and affiliate professor of optometry and vision science who coauthored a paperon it, says it’s like undoing what the optics in your eyes are about to do. The technology is being developed in collaboration with researchers at MIT and Microsoft. In addition to making it easier for people with simple vision problems to use all kinds of displays without glasses, the technique may help those with more serious vision problems caused by physical defects that can’t be corrected with glasses or contacts, researchers say. This includes spherical aberration, which causes different parts of the lens to refract light differently.