Population eye health education using augmented reality and virtual reality: scalable tools during and beyond COVID-19

### Summary box #### What is already known? #### What are the new findings? The COVID-19 outbreak has had a massive impact on healthcare systems, with over 12 million infected individuals as of 10 July 2020.1 This has necessitated operational overhaul in ophthalmology and other clinical specialties in accordance with public health measures such as physical distancing and cancellation of non-urgent clinical services.2 The downstream impact of these measures include the disruption of healthcare functions including preventive programmes such as eye screening, which serve a crucial role to detect disease at early stages before the onset of irreversible morbidity such as visual impairment (VI). VI is already a growing problem even in developed countries.3 By 2020, estimates show that 230 million individuals will be affected by VI,4 and that 20 million across Asia are already severely affected to the point of blindness.5 Studies have attributed an increased risk of death to VI6 7 …