 A lot of you know that my mother had macular degeneration and I actually have dry macular degeneration myself. I'm not yet going blind but we don't know what's going to happen in the future so I've got a lot of interest in blind accessibility anyway and so I've now stopped by the VisionAid booth to talk to Taylor Spiegel who has a terrifying pitch that he's going to convince me to try on these goggles anyway. Let's let him tell you what they're in business to do here. Absolutely. So we at VisionAid were focused on developing mixed reality technologies so headsets like this and how that can prove the lives of those with visual impairments. And so our first product is called iDisease Simulator. Oh goody, that sounds fun Taylor. It is exactly what it sounds like we're on the nose with the name and it allows people to experience first hand life through the eyes of someone living with iDisease and it can be from the earliest stages of macular degeneration for example to the most advanced stages. And the idea here is really all about empathy and understanding from medical students who are the future doctors and practitioners that are going to be seeing thousands of patients can they better understand that journey as well as someone recently diagnosed as well as their loved ones around them. That's an interesting idea with the loved ones to be able to understand what you really can't do or where you're going to need help and what it feels like huh. Yes and we've heard countless stories of those where you know somebody might drop a pen and be able to pick it up but then they also can't see the TV in front of them and a spouse or a loved one is confounded by that concept and through being able to see the eyes of that individual can completely change relationships dynamics at home for example color contrast of cups you have a white countertop you have white cups you have white plates. We've had people who the spouse has experienced it went home rearranged the house got high contrast cups and their whole lifestyle at home which is your everyday life has improved as a result. That's a really interesting idea I do remember my son Kyle making fun of my mother because we're watching the Rose Parade and my mother could barely see at this point and she said hey did you notice the water coming off the wheels on that cycle on the left side and he's like you've been faking all this time but it happened to be something she could see out of the side of her eye because the center vision was gone but not the side but he still gave her a hard time she had a good sense of humor about it though. Well that's good and we hear a lot of those stories and and this we began vision aid from our own personal experience my co-founders grandfather suffered from macular degeneration we saw firsthand his trajectory and how his path was and we started to explore well what other technologies are out there that can help him and the entire family and through that we started developing finding those gaps and developing our own technology. Now when we were speaking a little bit earlier he mentioned that that maybe if he'd been able to see a simulation of what his future was gonna be he would have gotten more medical care earlier and had things maybe slowed it down at the very least. Yes with a lot of these diseases macular degeneration glaucoma there's not a cure but you can slow down his trajectory dramatically and a lot of situations if you're lucky you can outlive the disease if you will so you'll never go legally blind however if you wait until you're say you have early stage glaucoma you can see just fine today but they were able to detect it you'll wait years in some situations to take your drops and to go into regular appointments until it's too late until you can't see well and your vision will never get better and the trajectory of that disease now means you're losing functional vision actively and more rapidly. I know two people who had early stage glaucoma and were able to get a surgery that they did the drops and that stopped being effective but they kept at it with the doctors and they had surgery that actually has now stabilized it for for now at least and with macular degeneration my my uncle did get the injections and it was probably like an extra decade that he was able to drive continuously and still read before it actually did progress beyond that but he was quite elderly at the by the time it hit him really badly so. And that's the goal you know in a way is to effectively outlive it and it doesn't just impact the individual but everyone around them their whole family experience you know the ability to have your own independence and be able to drive late into you know as late as possible as long as you need to that's really our goal there's great treatments and medications out there we're one of the few companies who are building technologies to make your senses worse but with a longer goal of improving quality of life and patient outcomes. Now so I think you're gonna make me wear this this virtual reality headset and this is an audio podcast but also has videos so I'm gonna be describing in detail what I see but one of the questions I asked Dr. Heatley as your advisor here and I asked him how you actually simulate what it is someone can't see because you can't see through their eyes you can see the effect on the the physiology but you really don't know what they can't see unless they have a way to describe it to you in some way so a little bit of this is generalization I think. Yes so there's obviously a body of clinical research of different ways to measure one's low vision or blindness if you will one common misconception is that if you lose vision it's always just blackness or lack of vision but a lot of the times take macular generation you lose central vision it's kind of like a blend of the colors of the environment around you so it's more of a gray or the tones of you know if you're in a forest in theory it'd be different kind of blended colors of that green background of a forest and that's part of what we're trying to get through is also create a gold standard of representation of these diseases because if you go on you know three different websites and Google you know what does it look like with glaucoma you may get three different things and that inconsistency drives us crazy personally and that's part of our goal there is you know we can look at things not only the clinical research but also let's say somebody has a lack of vision in one of their eyes and so you know glaucoma or macular generation is impacting just their right eye well that means that they are great candidates to help inform us on the accuracy of our own data because their right eye is experiencing the disease but they can still see our simulation with the left eye and so we can do that type of research on our end to help fine tune what diseases look like very very interesting now you've got several different kinds of eye diseases that I'm going to get to be able to see do you have are is it redna pigmentosa we don't yet we're actually that's the next disease that we're developing today that's the one I don't I don't have any feel for what they can see so I'll come back next year and see what you've done with it you know when you're upstairs maybe I just real curious what that one looks like but I guess is it time to torture me so I think you may have to hold the microphone so when I'm talking you need to hold it right up on me and then when you're talking hold it right up on you you got it make sure the disease is on okay all right terrify me the diseases on he says on you're looking at intermediate to severe stage macular generation okay okay so yeah that's interesting I'm seeing a pretty annoying gray bubble in the middle where right now I'm looking directly a tailor and I can't see his face but if I look over towards Steve to the left now I can if I it's kind of like when you try to look at a star and it disappears but if you look away you can see it yeah I don't want to see this but okay so that's moderate to severe what are you gonna do to me next so one key notes with macular generation is central vision loss that's your high fidelity vision that's your color vision and so that sometimes can be even at the smallest little blind spots in the center of your vision can take away a lot of your functionality your ability to read especially look at someone's in the face your loved one in the eyes you lose that ability so not only independence but a lot of the elements that make us us and so this is macular generation I'm gonna make this one stage worse for you before we move on if that's okay that sounds awesome okay okay I'm seeing the screen right now so I don't think I'm supposed to be am I okay so I just increased the severity to a late-stage macular generation so your center blind spot should be darker it should be larger and you're relying more and more on your peripheral vision yeah that's really interesting so it's it's almost black a lot of areas but it's got blobby gray spots and then most of the outside of his gray and I'm seeing you know maybe 10% around the edges yeah I could see how I could maybe walk through a room if I always look sideways but that's about all I could do and you and people who have this disease have to train themselves over time to rely entirely on your peripheral vision which is incredibly challenging yeah it's really hard it's really hard not to look at you I have to look away in order to see you that's interesting okay what what other torture do you have so let's go ahead and introduce you to glaucoma oh goody I do know the one thing I understood that my mother was really experiencing something awful with macular degeneration was when they thought she might have glaucoma and that terrified her because all she had left was the the periphery so to lose that would have been yes and we do have the ability with our eye disease simulator to stack the diseases because that brings up a very good point which is you your eyes won't necessarily be symmetric and you could have more than one condition but right now you're experiencing glaucoma and this is think of it as tunnel vision so you're losing the majority of all your peripheral vision so I'm noticing at this one with my left eye I've got some central vision the right eye has very very little is that on purpose you've made it unbalanced correct something that's often overlooked is the a symmetry of one's eyes a disease does not impact you the same on your left eye versus your right eye it can progress differently and so your mind actually does a very good job if you lose a part of your vision in one eye the other eye does a great job accommodating in your brain to process that information but it's really when those things like blind spots overlap that you completely lose that visual information wow yeah this is this is terrifying but I think it is good to try to try to understand it and experience it thank you of course thank you all right so if people wanted to find out more oh wait no tell you have another product that you also make which is why the company's called vision aid not vision terrified people make them scared to death that is even though that's a great name I do I do appreciate it yeah so vision aid started because our goal is to improve the quality of lives and aid the vision of those suffering from diseases and so in a way we do think eye disease simulator is a vision aid in the sense that it can help through the right actions retain vision for longer but our other product that we have an R&D right now is we call it vision aid air but it's actually augmenting one's vision in real time so think of it as similar experience you put on glasses the mixed reality headset but we now with the feet of the world around you can change that image in real time and help accentuate and improve your available vision so for example if you have a wavy vision like that's a symptom with a lot of diseases if and it's warped if we know where that is we can because we have the image we can counterwarp that image if I'd say AI in that sentence it's got to be some AI gonna happen there at CES there's gonna be a lot of AI the kind of AI washing but yeah that can be part of the training just to make us go faster and we can customize that faster I see AI really as an accelerant in that process but really the fundamentals of optics are if you can increase the light saturation and delivery to your eyes it can actually help reduce those blind spots that you saw a minute ago with like macular generation we can change color contrast higher contrast so you can still have differentiation so there's a lot that we can do to effectively put on a pair of sunglasses if you will and allow someone to have instant improvement in their vision and so that's really our main dreamscape right now with vision aid is step one we're going to make your vision worse but really step two is augment that vision and improve it people want to find out more about your work where would they go vision aid.io you can find out more about all the products that we have both available today as well as coming down the pipeline well congratulations for the work that you do here this is cool thank you thank you so much for coming by appreciate it