SBIR Phase I: Vergence tracking for automatically refocusing reading glasses

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是为20亿老花患者开发自动重新聚焦的老花眼镜。老花是一种常见的随年龄增长的视力丧失，无法聚焦附近物体。目前的老花镜、双光眼镜或渐进镜片等老花眼矫正方法既笨重又不自然，无法取代健康的视力。自动调焦系统将提供一个有吸引力的替代方案，通过恢复自然视觉，这样物体就会根据用户的目光被调焦。此外，工业部门工人的老花眼带来的生产力损失将为老龄化的熟练劳动力市场带来直接的机会，其中自动重新聚焦系统将提供显着的好处，用户将容忍更大范围的形状因素。这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目旨在研究基础视觉科学和用户行为与用于老花矫正的自动重聚焦系统的交互，解决大规模部署的设计要求，并建立一个原型系统来验证新的聚焦深度估计技术，这些技术可以达到商业头戴式产品的功率和小型化目标。目前最先进的眼动追踪系统只能解决全3D凝视估计的最高性能实现。主要的技术目标是设计一种低功耗的深度估计技术。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.