Transformative reality: Augmented reality for visual prostheses

Visual prostheses such as retinal implants provide bionic vision that is limited in spatial and intensity resolution. This limitation is a fundamental challenge of bionic vision as it severely truncates salient visual information. We propose to address this challenge by performing real time transformations of visual and non-visual sensor data into symbolic representations that are then rendered as low resolution vision; a concept we call Transformative Reality. For example, a depth camera allows the detection of empty ground in cluttered environments that is then visually rendered as bionic vision to enable indoor navigation. Such symbolic representations are similar to virtual content overlays used in Augmented Reality but are registered to the 3D world via the user's sense of touch. Preliminary user trials, where a head mounted display artificially constrains vision to a 25×25 grid of binary dots, suggest that Transformative Reality provides practical and significant improvements over traditional bionic vision in tasks such as indoor navigation, object localisation and people detection.