Many people need corrective lenses to see an image or read a text on a screen. So what if we could correct the display instead of the viewer's vision?

That's what researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are working on. They're developing computer algorithms to compensate for an individual's visual impairment and produce a custom-made image for that person. “Instead of relying on optics to correct your vision, we use computation,” explained Fu-Chung Huang, a Berkeley researcher.

This approach could potentially help hundreds of millions of people who currently need corrective lenses to see their screens, but especially patients with high order aberrations that cannot be corrected with glasses or contact lenses.

In their prototype, the researchers inserted a printed pinhole screen sandwiched between two layers of clear plastic into an iPod display. The tiny pinholes were 75 micrometres each and spaced 390 micrometres apart. By adjusting the intensity of the light emanating from each pixel in each direction, the researchers were able to create an image corresponding to the user's visual impairment.

“Our technique distorts the image such that, when the intended user looks at the screen, the image will appear sharp to that particular viewer. But if someone else were to look at the image, it would look bad,” said Brian Barsky, a Berkeley professor.

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140729152921.htm