Exciting Experimental Display Technology Could Let You Ditch Your Glasses and Contacts

A team from Berkeley, in collaboration with MIT and Microsoft, have developed a super exciting display technology that should have glasses and contact-wearing photographers jumping for joy. Due to be showed off at SIGGRAPH this coming week, the prototype they’ve developed automatically adjusts to suit your less-than-perfect eyesight so you can ditch your contacts and/or glasses when you’re using it.

Of course, this goes far beyond photography, but photographers spend more time staring at screens than most… and with the rise of the Electronic Viewfinder, the hours of screen time our eyes get are only increasing.

Imagine a technology that will allow you to ditch the cumbersome glasses, or take out the irritating contacts that you’ve had in all day, and use your LCD screen — be it your computer at home while post-processing, your live view, or your EVF — without any need of optical correction.

According to an MIT Technology Review report, the tech works by using algorithms to alter an image based on your glasses prescription together with a light filter in front of the display that researchers say turns a normal 2D display into a “light field” display.

Basically, those algorithms and screen distort the image in such a way that your video game and computer screen-mutilated eyes see a clear image instead of a blurry mess.

Unfortunately, prototype displays people could use IRL are still “a few years” away from fruition, but the tech is nevertheless exciting. And what’s more, Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab and coauthor on the paper about the tech, says that with a high enough res display, the tech could work for several people simultaneously.

To dive into the technical details or find out more about the technology, head over to the MIT Technology Review article or check out the full paper by clicking here.

(via Engadget)