SBIR Phase II: Vergence tracking for automatically refocusing reading glasses

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）二期项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是开发自动调焦老花眼镜，以供20亿老花患者广泛采用。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，无法完全取代健康的视力。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所看的位置被调焦。通过轻量级和健壮的全天使用实现，这样的系统将被广泛翻译，以解决全球数十亿人生产力和生活质量下降的普遍原因。这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）二期项目旨在开发导致自动再聚焦眼镜小型化的关键技术。现有的系统只能解决像VR或AR这样要求苛刻的应用程序的全3D凝视估计的最高性能实现，而且它们太耗电，对于自动重新聚焦的老花眼镜来说太大了。该项目将开发一个定制的硬件和软件系统，用于特定于该应用的新型深度估计。该项目将探索重量，功耗和外形因素的贸易空间，以制定最佳参数集。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 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.