Designing and Optimizing Daily-wear Photophobic Smart Sunglasses

Photophobia, also known as light sensitivity, is a condition in which there is a fear of light. Traditional sunglasses and tinted glasses typically worn by individuals with photophobia only provide linear dimming, leading to difficulty to see the contents in the dark region of a high-contrast environment (e.g., indoors at night). This paper presents a smart dimming sunglass that uses a spatial light modular (SLM) to flexibly dim the user's field of view based on scene detection from a high dynamic range (HDR) camera. To address the problem that the occlusion mask displayed on the SLM becomes blurred due to out-of-focus and thus cannot provide a sufficient modulation when viewing a distant object, I design an optimization model to dilate the occlusion mask appropriately. The optimized dimming effect is verified by the camera and preliminary test by real users to be able to filter the desired amount of incoming light through a blurred mask.