Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool! I can see there's a lot of creativity that goes into replicating in-person vision tests with a reasonably valid unsupervised version on people's home equipment. I hope you have success replicating as many of them as possible. It's interesting to think of the adversarial element in #5 where vision test results are used to qualify for something. In this case a completely unsupervised test is really easy to cheat…
Yeah, in the absence of in-person supervision, there are a lot of safety measures that need to be implemented. For example, making sure that people are at the correct testing distance (via a number of potential feedback mechanisms that we're testing) and making sure that people can't zoom in on the optotypes to cheat. The psychology of how people relate to their vision -- especially the independence that good vision…
1. We're currently exploring doing a distance check via the webcam using triangulation and face detection to tell folks how far from the camera they are.
2. The average monitor won't add much noise - if we're going by in person eye exams as the gold standard - there's actually a lot of variance between various doctor's offices (lighting, use of a projector/mirror to simulate distance vs placing the chart on the wall).
There's an interesting angle to doing eye exams digitally where we may be able to be more accurate than in in person exam (based on institutional research studies - not something we've yet personally explored).
5. Really interesting and valid point - making these types of questions more interactive is definitely on our roadmap.
6. Clinical trials will help vet any methods we build to show how they compare to existing practices