CatARact: Simulating Cataracts in Augmented Reality

For our society to be more inclusive and accessible, the more than 2.2 billion people worldwide with limited vision should be considered more frequently in design decisions, such as architectural planning. To help architects in evaluating their designs and give medical personnel some insight on how patients experience cataracts, we worked with ophthalmologists to develop the first medically-informed, pilot-studied simulation of cataracts in eye-tracked augmented reality (AR). To test our methodology and simulation, we conducted a pilot study with cataract patients between surgeries of their two cataract-affected eyes. Participants compared the vision of their corrected eye, viewing through simulated cataracts, to that of their still affected eye, viewing an unmodified AR view. In addition, we conducted remote experiments via video call, live adjusting our simulation and comparing it to related work, with participants who had cataract surgery a few months before. We present our findings and insights from these experiments and outline avenues for future work.