Prescription VR screens could overcome ill-fitting headsets

EyeNetra’s mobile, smartphone-enabled vision test could help produce vision-corrected VR screens.

As the world of virtual reality continues to expand, a crucial downfall faced by many consumers has not been fully addressed — catering to those who wear glasses. As any short and far-sighted user will know, current VR headsets are not particularly accommodating to frames, and often result in an awkward, ill-fitting experience. Aiming to help glasses-wearers equally enjoy VR is EyeNetra, who have developed portable eye-test devices that use a smartphone screen and app to correct vision.

The team was birthed out of a research project in MIT. Most people don’t have 20/20 vision, and the VR experience could be significantly dampened by users perceiving the screen as unaligned according to their eyesight. EyeNetra’s mobile eye-test device sees a headset that the phone sits in, and an app that will display patterns which users turn a dial to align, signaling any refractive errors in their vision. The team hopes to provide VR headsets with this technology, which will adjust the screen to users’ unique vision. Current VR headsets allow for spectacles by leaving increased space in front of the eyes, whereas a fully adaptive display would make this unnecessary, enabling a more compact, lighter headset that would offer longer and more comfortable use.

EyeNetra is currently looking for partners that would bring their ‘personalized correction’ screen into the world of VR. Could similar technology make other screens vision-correct?