Making VR less painful for the vision-impaired

https://goo.gl/c8aSw9

Vision is a complicated process, and a lot of things can go wrong — but common afflictions like nearsightedness or an inability to focus on objects close up affect millions. Combined with how VR presents depth of field and other effects, this leads to a variety of optical problems and inconsistencies that can produce headaches, nausea and disorientation.

VR headsets often allow for adjusting things like the distance from your eye to the screen, how far apart your eyes are and other factors. But for many, it’s not enough.

Every person needs a different optical mode to get the best possible experience in VR,” said Stanford’s Gordon Wetzstein in a news release.

His team’s research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes a set of mechanisms that together comprise what they call an adaptive focus display.

One approach uses a liquid lens, the shape of which can be adjusted on-the-fly to adjust for certain circumstances — say, when the focus of the game is on an object that the viewer normally wouldn’t be able to focus on. The screen itself could also be moved in order to better fit the optical requirements of someone with a given condition.

“The technology we propose is perfectly compatible with existing head mounted displays,” wrote Wetzstein in an email to TechCrunch. “However, one also needs eye tracking for this to work properly. Eye tracking is a technology that everyone in the industry is working on and we expect eye trackers to be part of the next wave of [head-mounted displays]. Thus, our gaze-contingent focus displays would be directly compatible with those.”