ChromaCorrect: prescription correction in virtual reality headsets through perceptual guidance

Abstract

A large portion of today’s world population suffers from vision impairments and wears prescription eyeglasses. However, prescription glasses cause additional bulk and discomfort when used with virtual reality (VR) headsets, negatively impacting the viewer’s visual experience. In this work, we remedy the usage of prescription eyeglasses with screens by shifting the optical complexity into the software. Our proposal is a prescription-aware rendering approach for providing sharper and more immersive imagery for screens, including VR headsets. To this end, we develop a differentiable display and visual perception model encapsulating the human visual system’s display-specific parameters, color, visual acuity, and user-specific refractive errors. Using this differentiable visual perception model, we optimize the rendered imagery in the display using gradient-descent solvers. This way, we provide prescription glasses-free sharper images for a person with vision impairments. We evaluate our approach and show significant quality and contrast improvements for users with vision impairments.