It doesn’t seem to have gone any further, though. The 2015 research paper “ ForeSee: A Customizable Head-Mounted Vision Enhancement System for People with Low Vision” by Yuhang Zhao (Tsinghua University), Sarit Szpiro (Harvard Medical School), and Shiri Azenkot (Cornell Tech) proposes a head-mounted vision enhancement system that looks like it’s based on an Oculus Rift headset. Although Apple has optional Zeiss lenses for those who wear glasses, it’s unclear if they’d be necessary for those of us whose eyes focus at the distance of those screens. In some ways, the Vision Pro is the ultimate version of this hack, combining as it does forward-facing cameras and screens right in front of your eyes. But I’ve always remembered just how well the iPhone hack worked and thought that if I was ever in a situation where my glasses were broken, it might be a lifesaver. In 2020, I got tired of having to switch between multiple pairs of glasses over my contacts for reading, driving, and bright sunlight, so I got a single pair of photochromic progressive glasses that work for everything and are with me at all times. I haven’t needed to use the iPhone like this again. This screenshot shows what I see on the iPhone screen, which is myself in a mirror so you can see how I have to hold the iPhone. For giggles, I even zoomed the view a few times to see something better than I would have been able to otherwise. With my ad hoc night-vision goggles in play, I walked downstairs and wandered around the darkened house until I found my glasses. To avoid having to turn all the lights on and off (this was before I had wired them all up with HomeKit-compatible switches), I switched to Video mode in the Camera app, swiped up on the image to display the controls, tapped the Flash button, and locked the setting to Flash On. Looking around with the iPhone blocking my eyes felt odd, but it worked like a charm. I opened the Camera app and held the iPhone in front of my face so the viewfinder was in focus. My contacts were off, I needed to go downstairs to find my glasses, and my iPhone was at hand. Though problematic for everyday life, that’s helpful for close-up work on electronics or other small objects, and I also often read in bed without glasses using my iPhone, which is easy to hold at that distance. I see perfectly at about a hand’s length from my face. Between the clear lenses and thin metal frames, there’s just not much to see. Although I can see well enough to navigate the house-I’m fine with large shapes and colors-I would have had difficulty finding glasses on a table or counter, especially in a dimly lit room. One night, after I had taken my contacts out, I realized my glasses were somewhere downstairs because I’d been traveling and hadn’t yet fully unpacked. Until several years ago, I wore contacts to correct my myopia, switching to glasses every night at bedtime. The discussion of how Apple’s Vision Pro puts a little screen in front of each eye reminded me of a neat discovery I made a while ago: if you’re near-sighted, you can use an iPhone to stand in for your glasses and even see in the dark. #1660: OS updates for sports and security, Drobo in bankruptcy, why TidBITS doesn't cover rumors.#1661: Mimestream app for Gmail, auto-post WordPress headlines to Twitter and Mastodon, My Photo Stream shutting down.#1662: New Macs, 12 top OS features for 2023, vertical tabs in Web browsers, watchOS 9.5.1.#1663: Exploring the Apple Vision Pro, 12 more OS features coming in 2023, new Apple service features, Apollo shuts down.#1664: Real system requirements for OS 2023, beware Siri creating alarms instead of timers.
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