I think my favourite project I’ve ever worked on was Prescription Check, the idea was that it would be great if people could take an eye test at home.
There are couple of big problems to solve, but the most interesting ones were that you needed to know the distance between the user and the screen and you needed to know objective scale of the objects on screen.
Fortunately they are connected. So for the v1, we got users to put a credit card on screen and then record the size of the credit card as it appeared. Once you knew that you could back out the screen size and then pixel density then you could show objects of a known size.
One you knew the known size of a object, if you could then detect it in a scene and you know a little about the camera you are using then you can back out from that how far the user was. De Goldberg and Ben Cohen did some amazing optimisations to make this all work
Overall it was a great project, and really a +1 for how fast small teams can move, the team built an iOS app, a web server, a bunch of web apps, and an EMR in less time than I’ve seen much bigger teams not ship an iOS app.
It wasn’t a massive success when it launched but when the pandemic hit people became a lot more interested in having their eyes tested at home.
Dee Goldberg, Joe Carrafa, Molly Rhodes, Lauralynn Drury and Ben Cohen did all the real work on the project, but was so fun.
