Smarter lenses
After five years of development and about 40,000 tests worldwide, the mobile eye-test device developed by MIT spinout EyeNetra is coming to hospitals, optometric clinics, optical stores, and even homes nationwide. But on the heels of its commercial release, EyeNetra says it’s been courting offers from virtual-reality companies seeking to use the technology to develop “vision-corrected” virtual-reality displays. “As much as we want to solve the prescription glasses market, we could also [help] bring virtual reality to the masses,” says EyeNetra co-founder Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab who co-invented the device. The device, called Netra, is a plastic, binocular-like headset. Users attach a smartphone, with the startup’s app, to the front and peer through the headset at the phone’s display. Patterns, such as separate red and green lines or circles, appear on the screen. The user turns a dial to align the patterns...