

Ask YC:  Is it possible to build a computer display that corrects your vision? - amichail

I know that 3D displays exist that don't require special glasses.<p>So maybe this is possible as well?
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jfoutz
The short answer is no. The long answer is, anything is possible. You have to
invent it or wait. Whatever you come up with is not going to look like a
conventional display.

I'd suggest spending a day with the optics section of a good physics book. I
have terrible vision, and both eyes are different. So the first thing _I_
would think about is how to get different light into each eye.

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nertzy
I give this a solid "no".

Notice that when you wear glasses, the lenses stay in the same place relative
to your own eyes.

The display would need to track your head position continuously in all three
dimensions and have some sort of rapidly-changing lens that continuously
adjusted which way the light was pointing so that it hit your eyes from the
same angles that were caused by the lenses of your glasses.

This might include growing and shrinking the lens as you move closer to it and
further from it. Notice the size difference between contact lenses and
wearable glasses lenses and extrapolate that to the screen.

Plus, you would get the bizarre sensation of seeing only the screen clearly
with everything else permanently out of focus.

All this, and the next person over still can't see it.

Even if this were somehow possible, it's hard to argue that it's a better
solution than putting lenses in front of someone's eyes.

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pierrefar
Correcting vision is about changing where the light lands on the retina in the
eye. I don't see how a display can do that, but I'm not a physicist and so
will not claim possibility, let alone impossibility.

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izak30
Strictly Guessing, but I would suppose that you could make a "Lens" out of a
polymer that would direct different images at each eye, for a given distance
of the viewer.

I don't know why I guess about such things though, it' just an interesting
problem.

This guess was based on the following: when I was a kid I went to a polymers
camp, one of the doctorate candidates students there was working on a covering
for LCD screens to correct the distortion at different angles, so it seems
possible.

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nsrivast
You mean to correct farsightedness? One could imagine displaying an image
corrected by a real or virtual convex lens, but the farther the "lens" was
from the viewer, the smaller the image would have to be (or the larger the
display).

Or the lens could be placed closer to the viewer:
<http://www.50plushealth.co.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2128>

But if it's that close already, why not just wear glasses?

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amichail
I mean to correct any common vision problem that would make it difficult to
see what's on the screen. So this would include not just farsightedness but
also astigmatism.

Some people don't like wearing glasses. At least with such a display, they
won't need to when using a computer.

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tylercarbone
The problem there is that, even if it were possible, most people do not have
the same astigmatism in both eyes... so which eye would you calibrate the
monitor to correct for?

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amichail
You would use a special sort of display that would direct a distinct image to
each eye.

3D displays that don't use special glasses already do this.

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euccastro
You mean these?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy>

You made me google it; I had no idea those existed. At first sight, it looks
like it should be able to do what you ask. Geez, it could even diagnose your
(short|long)sightedness|astigmatism and recheck it every now and then.

Pretty sweet tech; I hope it gets commercially viable soon!

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npk
There are a number of computer controlled glasses. Adaptive optics for
example:

See: <http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70181>

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amichail
The point of my proposal is to get rid of glasses while using a computer.

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jrockway
Try "M-x glasses-mode" in emacs.

