Designing and evaluating a customizable head-mounted vision enhancement system for people with low vision

Recent advances in head-mounted displays (HMDs) present an opportunity to design vision enhancement systems for people with low vision, whose vision cannot be corrected with glasses or contact lenses. We aim to understand whether and how HMDs can aid low vision people in their daily lives. We designed ForeSee, an HMD prototype that enhances people's view of the world with image processing techniques such as magnification and edge enhancement. We evaluated these vision enhancements with 20 low vision participants who performed four viewing tasks: image recognition and reading tasks from near- and far-distance. We found that participants needed to combine and adjust the enhancements to comfortably complete the viewing tasks. We then designed two input modes to enable fast and easy customization: speech commands and smartwatchbased gestures. While speech commands are commonly used for eyes-free input, our novel set of onscreen gestures on a smartwatch can be used in scenarios where speech is not appropriate or desired. We evaluated both input modes with 11 low vision participants and found that both modes effectively enabled low vision users to customize their visual experience on the HMD. We distill design insights for HMD applications for low vision and spur new research directions.