NASA Explores Potential Commercial Servicing for Hubble Telescope

On October 29th, NASA announced an interest in seeking industry capabilities to service the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in orbit for 34 years without maintenance. The task is akin to working on a $1.5 billion object, requiring precision millimeter work from a human or robotic pair of eyes – either blending seamlessly or causing the $1.5 billion object to become space debris.

The author, who suffers from amblyopia (lazy eye) since childhood, relates to the need for binocular precision. They explain how their daily work in software development, 3D printing and virtual reality (VR) serves as a metaphor for the challenge. While they compensate for depth perception issues using monocular cues, true stereopsis is still elusive. Intrigued by the potential of VR for binocular training, they discovered Amblyotube, a native VR app designed by Seven Sportz for Meta Quest 2/3/Pro/3S headsets.

Amblyotube utilizes a dual-render pipeline, rendering each frame twice – once for each eye. The left eye (usually the weaker one) receives enhanced visual cues, while the right eye displays standard visuals. The shader parameters are adjustable in real-time, enabling personalized therapy. The app also uses on-device machine learning for binocular fusion, identifying and sharpening the weaker eye's visual field while ensuring the dominant eye sees unaltered content.

Through daily VR sessions, the author experienced measurable improvements in their vision, including a decrease in logMAR scores. This progress is attributed to the engaging nature of the app, which utilizes content they already consume, making daily use more appealing than traditional compliance-based therapy. The author concludes by highlighting several takeaways for developers and clinicians in the field, including hardware-software co-design, parametrization, on-device ML, and clinical-grade metrics.