Benjamin T. Backus: “Virtual reality for vision testing and treatment of binocular vision dysfunction”

May 8, 2018  10:30 〜 11:30

CiNet 1F Conference Room

Benjamin T. Backus

Chief Science Officer, Vivid Vision, Inc., San Francisco, California
Associate Professor, SUNY College of Optometry, New York, New York

Host: Izumi Ohzawa (PI)

*This is a follow-up talk to that given last year, but this time from the Chief Science Officer of VVI:
See — November 10, 2017 by James Blaha
(CEO & Founder, Vivid Vision, Inc.)

https: //cinet.jp/english/event/20171106_2221

Abstract:

Consumer-level HMDs are adequate for many medical applications. Vivid Vision (VV) takes advantage of their low cost, light weight, and large VR gaming code base to make vision tests and treatments. The company’s software is built using the Unity engine, which allows for multiplatform support. New headsets are available every six months or less, which creates interesting challenges within in the medical device space. VV’s flagship product is the commercially available Vivid Vision System, used by more than 120 clinics to test and treat binocular dysfunctions such as convergence difficulties, amblyopia, strabismus, and stereo blindness. VV has also recently developed a new, VR-based visual field analyzer for home and field use.

Biography:
Ben Backus was Empire Innovation Associate Professor in Manhattan at the Graduate Center of the SUNY College of Optometry until October 2017, when he gave up tenure and moved to San Francisco to be Chief Science Officer at Vivid Vision, Inc. He still teaches and leads NIH-funded research in New York. He has training in mathematics (BA, Swarthmore), human vision (PhD, UC Berkeley), and visual neuroscience (postdoc, Stanford). He has also been a math teacher in the Oakland Public Schools and a professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.