A large portion of today’s world population suffers from vision
impairments and wears prescription eyeglasses. However, prescription
glasses cause additional bulk and discomfort when used with virtual
reality (VR) headsets, negatively impacting the viewer’s visual
experience. In this work, we remedy the usage of prescription
eyeglasses with screens by shifting the optical complexity into the
software. Our proposal is a prescription-aware rendering approach for
providing sharper and more immersive imagery for screens, including VR
headsets. To this end, we develop a differentiable display and visual
perception model encapsulating the human visual system’s
display-specific parameters, color, visual acuity, and user-specific
refractive errors. Using this differentiable visual perception model,
we optimize the rendered imagery in the display using gradient-descent
solvers. This way, we provide prescription glasses-free sharper images
for a person with vision impairments. We evaluate our approach and
show significant quality and contrast improvements for users with
vision impairments.