Ask YC: Is it possible to build a computer display that corrects your vision? | Hacker News Reader

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

5 pointsamichail15 comments

I know that 3D displays exist that don't require special glasses.

So maybe this is possible as well?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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!

ever heard of laser surgery?

There's a risk associated with that.

What about correcting for color blindness? There must be a relatively easy way to auto correct certain colors so they stand out more. I bet there'd be a market for that.

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

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

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

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

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