SBIR Phase II: Vergence tracking for automatically refocusing reading glasses

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is the development of automatically refocusing reading glasses for wide adoption by 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 fail to perfectly 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 where the user looks. With a lightweight and robust implementation for all-day use, such a system will be poised for wide translation to address a ubiquitous cause of decreased productivity and quality of life for billions worldwide.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop key technologies leading to the miniaturization of the automatically refocusing glasses. Existing systems address only the highest performance implementations of full 3D gaze estimation for demanding applications like VR or AR, and they are too power-hungry and large for automatically refocusing reading glasses. This project will develop a customized hardware and software system for novel depth-estimation specific to this application. The project will explore the trade space of weight, power consumption, and form factor to develop an optimal parameter set.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.