AR Device Warping Images Around Visual Obstructions
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Solution Overview
Problem
Individuals with visual impairments, such as blind spots or floaters, cannot view a full field of view due to obstructions in their vision, limiting their ability to perceive a scene comprehensively.
Innovation Solution
An electronic device captures images of a real environment, determines obstructed areas, and applies a warping function to surrounding areas, allowing the full field of view to be displayed by warping the image around obstructions, thereby enabling users to see the entire scene despite visual impairments.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a person views a scene through their natural field of view, then they can see the scene without processing, but obstructions such as blind spots or floaters block portions of the visual field
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary system consisting of a camera, processor, and display device that captures the real-world scene, processes it by warping around obstruction areas, and presents a corrected view to the user. This intermediary processing chain eliminates the direct path blocked by visual obstructions while maintaining natural viewing comfort.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates a copied version of the visual scene through camera capture, then applies computational warping to this copy to remove obstructions. The warped copy is displayed to the user instead of the original obstructed view, effectively replacing the flawed visual input with a corrected replica.
2Loss of information
If a person compensates for blind spots by viewing only portions of a scene at a time, then they can see around obstructions, but they cannot view the full field of view simultaneously
Solution Approach 1:
The patent transitions from direct spatial viewing to a processed dimensional representation. By capturing the scene with a camera and applying computational warping transformations, the system reconstructs the full scene in a new dimensional space that accounts for and compensates for blind spot locations, allowing simultaneous viewing of areas that would normally require head or eye movement.
3Reliability
If no image processing is applied, then the image processing system is simple, but the full field of view cannot be made available to users with visual impairments
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies parameter changes to the image data by transforming coordinates and applying warping functions that adjust the spatial parameters of the captured scene. These parameter transformations map the captured image to a corrected representation that fills in blind spot areas, achieving complete field of view availability through computational parameter manipulation.
Data Source
AI summary
Displaying a warped area includes obtaining an image of a real environment, obtaining a portion of a field of view comprising an obstruction, determining a portion of the image of the real environment corresponding to the obstruction, applying a warping function to an area surrounding the portion of the image of the real environment corresponding to the obstruction to obtain a warped area, and displaying the warped area.