MIT app uses mobile phone to determine eyeglass prescription

Next time you start to suffer eye-strain headaches, you may find yourself grabbing the phone not to call the Optometrist, but rather to find there really is “an app for that” courtesy of some MIT researchers.

The application shows two lines on the phone’s screen. It asks users to align them using the phone’s arrow keys while looking through the small plastic device placed atop the screen. The test is repeated eight times with the lines in different places on the screen, after which the application calculates the user’s prescription. The whole process takes about two minutes.

The process requires a small plastic cube that can currently be manufactured for only $2, but at volume could be mere pennies.  The work is to be presented next month at SIGGRAPH.

via MIT app uses mobile phone to determine eyeglass prescription – BusinessWeek.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .