Eye examination with a smartphone

Ramesh Raskar, a computational photography specialist at MIT, has developed a unique smartphone application that allows you to accurately determine the number of diopters for each eye using interactive 3D graphics. The program works so simply that it is even surprising why no one came up with this before and made a revolution in ophthalmology, which is still forced to diagnose a deviation of vision from the norm with the help of expensive equipment, such as in the photo. Now everything will change.

Development of Raskar called Near-to-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment (NETRA) renders a 3D-picture on the screen of a smartphone, only not for two eyes, as usual, but for one. The picture consists of two parallel lines located at such a distance from each other that, with a normally focused lens of the eye, they merge into one line. If a person's vision is different from the norm, then using the buttons of the smartphone, he brings the lines together until they merge. The distance is calculated by how many diopters vision differs from the norm.



For the program to work, a plastic peephole with lenses (lenslet in the diagram) is connected to the smartphone through which you need to look at the screen. The cost of the module is about two dollars, which is about ten thousand times cheaper than the equipment used in modern optometry.
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Ramesh Raskar will present the results of his work at the Siggraph conference, which will be held in Los Angeles in a month.

via New Scientist