Autofocals

Presbyopia, the loss of accommodation due to the stiffening of the crystalline lens in the eye, affects nearly 20% of the population worldwide. Traditional forms of presbyopia correction use fixed focal elements that inherently trade off field of view or stereo vision for a greater range of distances at which the wearer can see clearly. However, none of these offer the same natural refocusing enjoyed in youth. In this work, we built a new type of presbyopia correction, dubbed "autofocal," which externally mimics the natural accommodation response of the eye by combining data from eye trackers and a depth sensor, and then automatically drives focus-tunable lenses. We evaluated autofocals against progressives and mono-vision in a user study; compared to these traditional corrections, autofocals maintain better visual acuity at all tested distances, allow for faster and more accurate visual task performance, and are easier to refocus with for a majority of wearers.