The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the development of automatically refocusing reading glasses for the two billion people with presbyopia, a common form of vision loss with age that prevents focusing on nearby objects. Current presbyopia corrections, such as reading glasses, bifocals, or progressive lenses, are unwieldy or unnatural solutions that do not replace healthy vision. An automatically refocusing system will provide an attractive alternative by restoring natural vision, such that objects are brought into focus according to the user?s gaze. Furthermore, the loss in productivity brought on by presbyopia in workers in industrial sectors will open an immediate opportunity in the aging skilled labor market, where an automatically refocusing system will offer significant benefits and users will tolerate a wider range of form factors. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to study basic vision science and user behavior in interaction with an automatically refocusing system for presbyopia correction, address design requirements for deployment at scale, and build a prototype system to validate novel focus depth estimation techniques that can reach the power and miniaturization targets of a commercial head-mounted product. Current state-of-the-art eye tracking systems address only the highest performance implementations of full 3D gaze estimation. The main technical objective is the design of a low-power depth estimation technique.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
