Augmented View

Peripheral-awareness demo for tunnel vision

This simulates what a person with tunnel vision (choroideremia, retinitis pigmentosa, advanced glaucoma) would see when wearing a pair of future augmented-reality glasses.

Hold the phone at arm’s length.

Most of the screen will be dark — representing the dead peripheral retina the patient cannot see with.

A central circle shows the narrow slice of the real world the patient still sees naturally (tunnel vision).

A smaller rectangle floats inside that circle — the augmented-reality overlay projected into the eye. It is physically smaller than the tunnel, but it contains edge contours from a wider angular range than the tunnel covers. That is the peripheral information the device supplements.

Camera permission required. Works best in landscape orientation, in a well-lit room.

What you are looking at

The phone screen represents what one eye of the patient sees while wearing the device.

What the real device actually does (research-validated)

The rectangle — the transparent waveguide’s 26° projection area in front of one eye.
Real-world light passes through the waveguide glass at about 80% transmittance — the patient sees the real world directly, slightly dimmed, everywhere inside the rectangle.
The white edge contours in the outer ring are semi-transparent, additively projected on top of the real-world view. They represent a compressed mini-map of everything the wide-angle chest camera sees — ~120° of peripheral content packed into the 26° display area. This is the 5× minification the device exists to deliver.
The small clear zone at the rectangle’s center is deliberately left blank — no overlay is drawn there. The patient can look directly at a face, a book, a doorknob without edges obscuring it.
The tiny crosshair is a registration mark that helps the brain calibrate the ring’s compressed content to real-world spatial positions during the first 2–30 minutes of training.

Demo illustrations (communication aids, not the real device)

The dark area outside the circle — a visual stand-in for the patient’s dead peripheral retina, so a sighted viewer can imagine what tunnel vision feels like. In real life the patient experiences this darkness regardless of the device.
The zoomed-in view in the tunnel circle — simulates a narrower natural angular field on a phone camera with a fixed lens. The real device makes no such alteration to the patient’s natural vision.

On the real device, the rectangle is projected at optical infinity — at the same focal distance as distant real-world objects. The patient’s functioning macula reads the edges and the brain interprets them as spatial awareness of what is to the sides. After training, patients in published studies stopped describing the overlay as “a little TV” and started describing it as “how I know what is around me.”