Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Poor Vision? There's an App For That

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.

necro81 writes "Researchers at MIT's Media Lab have developed a smartphone app that allows users to measure how poor their vision is (myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism) and receive a corrective prescription. The user peers through a $2 optical adapter at the screen of a smartphone. The app displays lighted bars, and prompts the user to adjust the display until the bars line up. Repeating this with bars in different locations and orientations allows the vision distortion to be determined to within about 0.4 diopters using a Nexus One. The iPhone 4, with its higher-resolution display, should be able to improve that to 0.28 diopters. This could have broad application in the developing world, where experienced opticians and diagnostic equipment are hard to come by."

2 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Passive Agressive Marketing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    For "developing world" read "we're too shit scared to try this in the domestic market so will run a backdoor field trial and hope it gets enough attention to launch back home". It's the same with gutless politicians and academics. They don't have the balls to take on domestic interests or want to get some brownie points for patronising the poor. Take a look at Microsoft's feeble attempts to capture the mobile phone market or the One Laptop Per Child bollocks. They're all risk averse chicken shit unimaginative patronising wankers.

  2. Re:App for that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    "This could have broad application in the developing world, where experienced opticians and diagnostic equipment are hard to come by."

    Now why on Earth could that be? Does he mean the THIRD WORLD, rather than the (cough) "developing" world? Surely he doesn't mean the part of the planet that is inhabited by useless BLACKS, whose average IQ is about 70?

    So why are "experience opticians and diagnostic equipment" "hard to come by" (cough cough) in Africa?

    Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Africans HAVE NEVER INVENTED A WRITTEN LANGUAGE.

    So there IS no history of Africa, before 'evil' white people went there. Still, let's keep the big lie going for as long as possible, probably right up until YOUR country is overrun with these 'wonderful' people, and YOUR children are living in abject poverty (or worse, are dead) because of it.