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Adaptive Optics May Enable Super-Human Vision
jonwiley writes: "Science Daily reports in this article 'Adapting technology originally developed by astronomers to obtain better images of the heavens, a University of Rochester scientist has developed an optical system that has given research subjects an unprecedented quality of eyesight. The research dramatically improves the sight even of people who have 20/20 vision.'" I knew I should hold off on laser surgery. This and a bionic claw, and superhero fantasies are mine!
I really want to try one of these things. I can remember the first time I put on glasses when I was nine or ten, the difference was like a heat haze in front of my vision had disappeared - or going from VCR to DVD. So you can imagine that trying on adaptive optics is even more astonishing.
Do these things give you better than 20/20 vision? Is 30/30 going to be a catch phrase of our future :-)
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
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Thus Spake ComradePenguin
Isn't the "Upgrade" topic icon the coolest?
There are two major products that come out of Berkel
Yeah, a beach full of skeletons! That would be something :-)
Those Singularity guys are scary! Not the creating-AI part, not the research, just the part where they expect that once the Singularity ('transhuman' intelligence) comes into being, it will be able to synthesize nanotechnology to spread across the globe and wrest control from the hands of humanity.
Personally, I find it much less spooky to remember that the word 'cyber' comes from a word meaning 'helmsman'. These things are tools; tools we can use to better ourselves. We won't be replaced by the AI, we'll become the AI.
-Grendel Drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
in eyesight perfect is defined as the average.
By perfect I wasn't referring to the eyesight (where an official { = lie } redefinition of "perfect" might apply) but to lens shape (where the officials haven't trashed the language.)
Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. B-)
Now what I want is broad spectrum eyesight..IR, maybe a bit of UV...
IR is tough, but UV is easy. The retina is sensitive to it, and the cornea and humors pass it. Just remove the lens and substitute something that passes UV (such as glass). If you're so old that your lens has hardened and won't flex well to focus, you won't even miss it.
This operation was standard for lens disease in the WW II era - with some interesting side effects:
Some oldsters who had had it done and who knew code were assigned to ships stationed off the French coast. The French Resistance had UV semaphore lights, and would blink messages to the ships. The blinks were invisible to normal eyes, and even if you had instruments you'd have to know where to aim. But those with the operation could just look at the coast, and the light would stand out like a blinking spotlight (which it was).
The definitive text on ground-based ultraviolet astronomy was written by an astronomer who had had the operation, and for whom UV stars were naded-eye objects. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you run NT and crash, would it be the "Blue 'Balls of Death"?
"Ever since I switched to UNIX, I don't have any blue balls..."
I know there have been several other baseball players (Wade Boggs for example) who had 20/12ish vision, and then worsened to 20/20... he had won a number of batting championships, and then hit .256 (pretty lame). Got contacts to correct him to 20/15 or so, and his average went back up.
Judging by the number of strikeouts Sosa has compared to his homeruns (2.5:1 one time I checked), his vision isn't all that spectacular, but he swings really hard....
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Shouldn't that be post-butlerian-jihad? ;)
JIHAD, BUTLERIAN (see also Great Revolt)--the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as "Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Actually, Dune is on-topic for this article.. Remember the oil lens?:
OIL LENS: hufuf oil held in static tension by an enclosing force field within a viewing tube as part of a magnifying or other light manipulation system. Because each lens element can be adjusted individually one micron at a time, the oil lens is considered the ultimate in accuracy for manipulating visible light.
That's what we need to replace our eyes..
I'm a sports shooter. Air rifle (10m standing) and .22 longrifle (12m/50m kneeling/lying) are my preferred diciplins, and I've also done some archery for the fun of it. The quality of your vision doesn't have very much to do with hitting the target. Well, if your vision is so bad that you can't see the target, that will be detrimental, ofcourse, but with rifle shooting what you should do is "simply" to line up the three circles (target and sights) so they're perfectly concentric, then pull the trigger carefully to not move the rifle. Actually, what you do is pull the trigger slowly in a fluent motion to prevent trembling, taking away 2/3 of the trigger pressure in 1/3 of the time, and make sure you're on the target when you pull through. Much more a game of concentration, control and timing than of vision. And for archery it's pretty much the same.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
id Software Releases IDEYES
Keep up the good work, Malda & Co.
sup
Interesting. So mankind has been accumulating genetic defects for some time now. Wonder how long it will take until nature catches up on modern healthcare...
Scary, and not much to do about it either... nothing thats morally acceptable at least. OTOH I guess it will take a few hundred years before any effect is noticeable.
what about for military sharpshooters, government spies, etc.?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
My friend actually has around 20/8 vision, and it really messes with your depth perception. He had to spend 2 years of his life before kindergarten with specialists doing things like playing catch with foam balls and driving power wheels (yeah, he loved it) without crashing to practice using his depth perception.
I thought it was 20 point font at 20 feet.
This is a perfect example of the danger of assuming that things you make up are correct. Normal is what you get when you test a bunch of people who don't need corrective lenses.
actually, there was a study done last year (sorry, no link - don't believe me, I'm making this up!) that concluded that there was a statistical correlation (not necessarily cause/effect) between nearsightedness, and having had a night-light during the first 5 years of life. If you had a night light, you were more likely to need glasses, they said.
Their hypothesis was that maybe the human eye was not supposed to have stimulation at all druing sleep, during the formative years, that with the eyes closed, and person asleep, enough photons leaked through the eyelids from the night light to affect the development of the eye.
Sounds interesting, but they'll have a heck of a time coming up with a mechanism to support that, even if the data does.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I thought 20/20 just meant that at a distance of 20 feet, an object looks like it's 20 feet away
You are literally correct, but your interpretation is slightly off. What it means is that at 20 feet away, an object looks as clear and sharp as it should for 20 feet away - that is as clear and sharp as a normal person would see it. 30/10 would mean that at 30 feet away you could see things as clearly as a normal person could at 10 feet. Certainly a boost.
While I think the benefits would certainly outweigh the negative aspects of seeing things much more clearly, I agree that there would be certain drawbacks and it would be nice if you could turn it off. Girls look so much prettier when I take off my glasses.
What if this article detailed a technology that could make people smarter?
Sign me up!
At what point is improving ourselves dangerous or unethical?
Dangerous? When you're in the first trial. Darwin frowns on early adopters.
Unethical? When I run out of cash and have to steal to feed my bioenhancement habit.
It's interesting to me that vision enhancement is largely seen as harmless... but how would strength enhancement, or intellect enhancement be seen?
Many people will object to it. Many coutries will ban it, except for bringing the below average up to average. It will be publicised as the greatest evil since genetically engineered food on the covers of Time and Newsweek. It will be available though, just as megalomaniacs will be having clones made within 5 years.
It's interesting, though, that the ability to enhance intelligence will have an exponetial factor in its growth. That is, it will be limited by things like skull size, oxygen requirements, signal propogation delays, and so on, but it is also limited by the intelligence of the people who are working on it. This is one of the technologies that can lead to Vinge's Singularity. ( see http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html )
I'm really curious what we will look like a thousand years from now. If we do in fact expand outward, it will be the most adventurous types who do so. So we have self-selection to make sure that any colonies on other planets will be much more novelty friendly than earth is. They'll also have more kids, in the long run. And the second generation colonies will be founded by the most adventurous from the first stage colonies. I don't see a universe filled with intellectual, sessile, nearly immortal homebodies. On the contrary, my mental picture is much closer to biker gangs or that alligator guy on discovery channel. Long life an risk aversion are not survival traits.
Yeah, yeah, I am a little nuts. But in a good way.
His device broke a single laser beam into 20 sub-beams and recombined them into a spot about an inch across that could move anywhere across an 8 inch circle. It was steered using piezoelectric mirrors (each on separate mounts - the whole thing looked like a frankenstein project compared to current technology). The focusing was entirely done by shifting the phase of each sub-beam.
There was feedback in the system that used varying frequencies to slightly modulate each beam and then combine the phases to get the best focus on a target. The whole thing could work automatically to track a small white target on the end of a stick.
The researcher inadvertently discovered that if he walked through the beam it would lock onto and track his shiny belt buckle. I saw this demonstrated in an 8mm movie he shot. Considering that this was being developed for tracking nuclear missiles he said he found this a little disturbing.
Also of note is his early use of color animated computer graphics. He printed out beam fluxes across the region during various simulations as integer digits on line printer paper. Then he assigned his young son to color in all the digits a certain way, so 0 went uncolored while 9 was yellow. Then he used a cable-release on his 8mm camera to animate the calculated simulations of beam tracking.
They've come a long ways, I see. His crude device probably cost $100,000 or more and I expect took about a year to build.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Since video card technology is progressing so quickly, human visual perception will become the system's last bottleneck. The only logical outcome is for people to start overclocking their eyeballs.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
so you can finaly read the text in Flyspeck 3 at the bottom of a legal document.Undrestanding it is another matter,however.
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Thus Spake ComradePenguin
At what point will we cease to be human and become something different? The world may very well change in a fundamental way well within our (extra-long?) lifespan.
WOWZA! Now I don't have to buy a bigger monitor! Just think, now we don't need bigger monitors! Now I can view my 320x200 pr0n from across the room when my monitor is in 1024x768 and not have to squint, much less wear glasses.
Ahh, I love progress...
Great, just what I need... a new piece of hardware to upgrade every 6 months. I guess it will help the frame-rate flickers I seem to be getting recently (I really need to consider leaving getting more than 2 hours of sleep a night.)
Did anyone get the fillrate on this sucker? Does it come with hardware T&L?
We are the borg! We want our eyepiece back!
I'd rather turn this question around. Who in their right mind would not want to be able to see better than 20/20 ! I can see no ill effects from this (assuming adaptive optics are safe, which seems reasonable), and many benefits, making travelling easier (can see sign and obstacles from further away), less chance of misinterpreting text, and ease of spotting people, just to name a couple off the top of my head.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
Since they map out tiny retinal inconsistencies with this, howsabout they use that data to resurface the retina or whatnot to correct for the problems. I understand that it wouldn't be as simple as the RK stuff... however, I do remember hearing about some condition (I forget the name... naughty me) where the retina sloughs off after a fashon and can be reattached to the back of the eye with lasers. Sort of like spot welding. I'd figure that that would change the topology of the retina so... why not develop something that would change that topology rather than something that reads and corrects for it? Sort of like the step between supplimentary lenses (e.g. glasses, contact lenses) and RK surgery and its brethren.
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
Many folks believe that nature has already caught up with modern health care:
Antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Increased cancer rate.
Increased instance of allergies and hypersensitivity.
Etc.
I have bad eyes. I know I'm supposed to be dead and have no offspring. My wife recently developed a strong reaction to strawberries (which she didn't used to be allergic to) - after she had kids, but I suppose a death due to anaphalactic shock while our kids were so young could affect the survivabiltiy of the offspring; without a mother to pick up after them, how long would they survive in the wild?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What is this? See Mars from your backyard without
a telescope?! See the future?
AO is great (in fact, there is this huge AO laser
in the office next to mine right now). AO is cool.
But AO is built for telescopes, and you need a
calibrating star (or the said laser to mimic a star) so that your piezos can dynamically adjust
your optics to "de-twinkle" the atmospheric turbulences. How do we use AO to "de-twinkle" our computer screens is beyond me...
And what's this about seeing Mars from backyard? How the hell are they going to overcome the Rayleigh's Limit of optics? (resolution = lambda/D) That's a HARD physical limit. As long as our eyes are 1 cm across, whatever sh*t you put it in front of our eyes, AO included, is not going to allow us to see the Mars other than a dot!
I don't even want to talk about the B&L seeing the future thing. U of Rochester has just bombed its reputation. (at least in my books.)
Rant Over.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Superhuman sight
Naked eyes, able to read
Microsoft license
I remember the first time I put my new glasses on... Wow! Trees have leaves! Not just a blurry shade of green :)
For me the kicker was finally understanding the phrase "the man in the moon". That one had puzzled me for years...
I see a few mentions of eye surgery. Please don't let /. or newsgroups be your main source of advice in stuff to do with your eyes, consult a number of patients and surgeons, doctors too.
That aside, FWIW, I have had cataract surgery in both eyes. I have fixed focus but the clarity is little short of a miracle. I know the down side btw.
My point is that enhancing eyesight with "cool" technology shouldn't be done as some sort of geek fashion statement, because messing with the highest bandwidth input to your brain is -risky-. Please, look after your eyes.
Back in Boy Scouts, I did enjoy being able to identify trees from a distance, because I could see individual leaf shapes before the other guys, but that's of pretty limited usefulness. ("Good Lord! I sure am glad I knew that was a basswood or else I would have been toast!") ;)
Now, my wish list for vision improvements in the future:
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
You're right, we should stop trying to augment the abilities of our eyes, and while we are at it stop trying to cure blindness. Technology is bad. What if the government healed blind people and then made them secret agents who went around enforcing national security or something? We couldn't have that. Down with technology. Ledskof "The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us will go to the stars."
This is my sig. The post is over.
Bionic eyes, what's next? woohoo
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
Heh, you mean we might actually see this? ;-)
This has actually been discounted by a couple follow up studies in Nature. (I'd give a link to the abstract which you can read for free, but I couldn't figure out how to deep link into Nature's site.) The scientists involved seem to think that it was hereditary- Myopic parents were more likely to leave a night light on in their children's rooms so that they wouldn't have to fumble around in the dark.
Allright.. You propose we stop a potentially very useful technology - because it would screw up sports? You desperately need to get your priorities straight!
-JeppeStop the brainwash
... I could really enjoy the scenery at the beach. ;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
it;s all very nice and all...
but, i can't seem to get the link open. 2 bad
With simulation of adaptive optics in combination with pupil enlargement you get a picture that gets aliased (like in computer graphics), ie the cones and rods are to large to resolve the image and hence the brain might create an image that is pixelated (or is Brain GTS(tm) equipped with full screen anti-aliasing?).
I recently read an article where they used the aliasing in a video recording to increase the resolution of the individual frames in the video (Do a search on super resolution to find out more). If this can be done in software I wouldn't be surprised if the human visual system can make use of aliasing in moving scenery as well.
...actually he still is.
It is more on the test subject side of it though.
But still, it is quite exciting. When driving he now sees things before they happen.
So now that we can plug directly into the optical nerve, why stop at replacing eyes? I mean wouldn't it be nice to see full spectrum? Infrared? Ultraviolet? Imagine lowlight for night driving and telescopic/microscopic for astronomy/bio class. Possibly a Van Eik (sp?) Monitor for seeing a monitor from far off. Why not have an external jack? It would certainly decrease wearable computer sizes. Imagine Quake? Full Eye View! Nintendo directly into your brain! Why stop there? I mean you could build a pager into your body. Tracking devices. GPS. The possibilities are endless. Please refer to your nearest CyberPunk(tm) manual for details.
Just Please....Don't run it on WinCE...
Blue Eye of Death!
-- Mike wildcard@illuminatus.org
Anyone remember that supposedly some special contact lenses were able to improve vision in the dark dramatically? This is because in the dark our pupils are bigger so the focusing is not as good, the contact lenses apparently fix that.
Anyone has links to more info?
Cheerio,
Link.
The term 20/20 vision simply means that you can see at 20 feet what you would normally be able to see. Super good vision would be 20/60 (I may have the order reversed...) which would mean that at 60 feet you can see what a normal person can at 20 feet. 60/20 vision OTOH would mean that at 20 feet you can see what a normal person can see at 60 feet.
There's about 0.00001 m of depth to it. To quote:
a University of Rochester scientist has developed an optical system that has given research subjects an unprecedented quality of eyesight. It then goes through 16 paragraphs without explaining what this "optical system" is or what it exactly does. Is it contact lenses? Goggles? A new version of lasic surgery? The closest it ever gets is a freakin' blurb about inventing a machine that maps out a persons' eyeball in great detail. Yeah. Woohoo. Yet another example of wonderful net journalism.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
20/20 means "Can see at 20 feet as well as a 'normal' person can see at 20 feet." So, 30/30 vision would mean "Can see at 30 feet as well as a 'normal' person can see at 30 feet." i.e.; "normal" vision.
Someone with better than normal vision has 20/x vision, where x < 20. For example, Chuck Yeager in his prime apparently had 20/10 vision... he could see at 20 feet as well as a 'normal' person can see at 10 feet!
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
I was talking to an opthamoligist just this weekend about this, and he claimed they were working on incorporating it into laser eye surgery.
Just FYI, 30/30 would be the same as 20/20. I think the ratio is "Quality of eyesight that patient experiences at 20 feet" == "Quality of eyesight that people with 'perfect vision' experiences at feet" so 20/120 means the patient sees at 20 feet what someone with "perfect" vision experiences at 120 feet. Therefore 20/10 or 20/5 would be more like "superhuman" ... although I think some people really do have 20/10 (?)
the real at&t mix
'course, it would be even cooler if it could be done with contacts... but that's pretty unlikely.
it's interesting how it can correct for defocusing (near/far sightedness) with a single deformable mirror... i wonder how they manage that.
--
Does really enjoying Bobby's adventures
constitute a total break with reality
or merely a rather pathetic fascination
regarding a sub-culture within
a sub-culture?
Maybe I lack clarity of vision regarding this(?).
#software solutions for a post-butler-jihadian age#
I wonder if the imperfection on your lens change when your eye refocuses. If that were the case then you would really need to carry around this big bulky thing to constantly correct your vision.
I assume they were going to take the data from the instrument in order to come up with a funky shaped glasses lens to correct for imperfections in your eye. Well, look at how expensive normal glasses are. Optically your normal eye glasses are pretty simple. They don't even use parabolic lenses but rather spherical ones since they are easier to produce and polish.
It seems to me that we don't have the technology to produce the odd ball shaped lense to correct for imperfection in your eye. How would you polish and coat such a lense with an antireflective coating? If each lense would need to be custom made for every customer than you can imagine how expensive these would be. Of course no one is going to carry around a computerized adaptive optic all the time.
My guess is that these will only be used for specific purposes. Maybe they could come up with expensive funky telescopes that let you see far away and correct for your eye sight. I believe adaptive lenses are getting cheaper and cheaper these days.
Surgery based on this technology would be a bad idea! Keep in mind that the human body changes over time. This is living tissue, not a machine! Most eyes go from normal or nearsighted (whichever the case may be) in their youth to (slightly) farsighted in their middle age and get worse from there.
I expect that the slight local aberrations which this adaptive optics technology measures and corrects change even more over time. That would make surgical correction a bad move, as the correction would develop into more aberrations over time.
Also, current LASIK and other laser surgery techniques are rather crude and can leave you with less than perfect vision. Furthermore, they are known to introduce glare, halos and other gost images of things with very high contrast. i.e. the quality of local visual perfection actually goes down, especially in the periphery. You'd most likely need more adaptive optics after LASIK than before.
Laser surgery produces scar tissue in an otherwise perfectly clear tissue which had a lot of clean, local structure (neat hexagonal patches, for example). I just can't see why healed, scarred tissue should be superior to what grows naturally, even if imperfectly.
Finally, adaptive optics improve vision especially in low light situations. LASIK is known to make your eyes worse under these same conditions. Doesn't sound like a good match to me.
Frankly, I prefer an external device that can be periodically retuned to perfectly (or as closely as can be, at least) match the current state of my eyes.
Check the I Know Why Refractive Surgeons Wear Glasses site for more details on laser eye surgery.
I'd be very surprised if it was a lens and not a mirror. I did my PhD in making mirrors for adaptive optics - I've met the group from Rochester. Almost all adaptive elements (currently) are reflective - although LCD elements (used in phase rather than amplitude mode) could potentially be used in transmission.
But I wonder if in theory they could use the measurements to smooth out all the imperfections, presumably using laser surgery, and permanently give you the super vision.
Yes, they absolutely could. A guy i shared an office with during my PhD was doing exactly these types of measurements (see here ). He measured my eye, and came out with a complete map of the aberrations - i.e. the deviation from the perfect shape. He discovered that my cornea deviates from ideal by less than 0.5 microns - which is pretty good (i'd need about 0.25 dioptre lens to correct this).
Edric.
> so-called "laser eye surgery",
I don't see wehat's so "so-called" about it. It uses a laser. on the eye. as surgery.
> which is referred to by its own practicioners as slash and burn
What does this prove, except that medics have a twisted sense of humour about thier work. But knowing several medics, I knew that already.
> you really looked into the way they are creating scars on the lens, etc
That's not what I read.
> you'd not want that to happen to your eyes
I did and I don't regret having done it. It's a lot better than specs or contacts.
Sure next year's model will be better, and sure there's no sense in cutting an eye which has normal vision. But if you are going to do corrective surgery, you might as well do a good job as you can.
If you've really got some data against it, how about a URL?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
that makes much more sense.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Try looking at something colorful on the edge of your field of vision next time you are outside at night. You'll see you won't be able to distinguish color as well.
Try looking at anything at night for that matter. The rods handle most of your vision at night (scotopic vision), the cones most of your vision in daylight (photopic vision). Besides, colour perception involves much more than just the retina. For instance, if you know that trees are dark green, you can easily perceive them as slightly greenish at night. Otherwise I liked your post.
Anonymity fears no Karma.
Maybe it should. Nowadays, if you get to many negative moderations your IP will be temporarily blocked...
This mainly has to do with the way rods and cones are arranged in our eyes. Rods and cones being the receptors of light inside your eye. Rods are extremely sensitive to light and dark, and can discern changes in luminosity levels quite easily. Their only drawback is that all they can tell apart is light or dark. If your eye was only rods you'd see in black and white. Cones, on the other hand, can see in color, or rather, can help you see in color. That's because there's three different kinds of cones; each one detects either red, green, or blue light (the RGB spectrum). They, however, are not as sensitive to changes in the level of light as the rods are.
Furthermore, a special problem is created the way these receptors are arranged inside your eye. Rods can be found all over your retina, while cones are found mostly in the middle of it. This causes two things: First off, your eye's 'resolution' so to speak, is higher in the middle. Secondly, you can distinguish color better when the object in question is in the middle of your field of view. This is not to say that normal vision has a center circle of color surrounded by black and white.
(Well, if your vision is like this, I would consult a professional.)
Rather, in instances where the level of light is too low (i.e. near the cone's threshold between 'seeing' and 'not-seeing' colored light), you may not be able to see color as well. Try looking at something colorful on the edge of your field of vision next time you are outside at night. You'll see you won't be able to distinguish color as well.
I think any eyesight system should be able to take this into consideration. Until we can either electrically send visual signals directly into the brain, we won't be able to pass this natural barrier. Even if your focus is 20.00/20.00, your vision is not perfect. Now, if someone could make some cone-growing eye drops...
Disclaimer: I don't work in the field of science, and my memory may not serve me well, so please correct any of my errors.
Anonymity fears no Karma.
The thing is that there is no surgery involved for this - they test your eyes using a laser, and then an optical device that sits on your face configures itself to give you "super-vision". There is no implants etc. involved here.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
you are a moron
let every man be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.
With high-resolution monitors and TrueColor, we were reaching the limits of what the average eye could distinguish. This must make monitor manufacturers pretty happy.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
I think it's because natural selection has been blown away by corrective lenses. Without them, for example, I would be dead in the 15th(lenses by then?) century by now. I would be useless to society - I couldn't hunt to provide food for my family for instance. What chick would want to hook up with a person like that? Of course you could take this farther and talk about other physical defects as well. That is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm having trouble figuring out what this is; I must have missed it in the article. Is it a set of really bulky glasses? Is it some kind of contact lens? An implant, maybe?
As an RIT student, I figure I might be able to get in on the ground floor with these experiments (URochester and Bausch & Lomb are both right in town), but I'd only do it if it were in a set of eyeglasses (with or without external accesories).
The reason: I want something easily reversible. 15 years after the first successful eye surgeries to correct nearsightedness, we're finding that the people eventually needed glasses again, this time for farsightedness. The procedure worked all right, but it worked too well.
But if the current technology works as an eyeglass-type thing, where do I sign up? I'm really nearsighted myself, and if this procedure can correct defocus, astigmatism, and deformities they don't even have names for, then I'm all for it.
We're not talking about superpowers here. It's just vision enhancement. Save your fears for a technology that matters, like anti-aging treatments. Could easily happen within a generation or 2.
I think the real boost would be like 30/10 vision, whereby at 30 feet an object seems 10 feet away. Hmm... well, assuming you can do this without screwing up your sense of depth perception that is.
Really cool would be some sort of "extended focal length" type of vision, simulating the zoom or telescopic nature of a long length camera or telescope lens. At the same time, a wide angle mode might be interesting as well, assumign your peripheral vision cna pick up everything.
Ahh hell, the best solution would be to just go totally Lee Majors & get bionic eyes, and the rest of your body while you're at it. Then you can fine tune your vision & abilities to any situation :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I can see the marketroids in action already.
Lets call it the BugEye5000.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
It's already been invented.I'm sure most of you have already heard of this but anyway:
Just get a hold of one of the older Sony Handicams with Nightvision and hack it. There are many sites on the net which will guide you through it, like: This Site
I know these aren't exactly glasses, but with a little work...you could make a pretty discrete system.
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Scuba diving will never be the same.
What if this article detailed a technology that could make people smarter?
At what point is improving ourselves dangerous or unethical?
It's interesting to me that vision enhancement is largely seen as harmless... but how would strength enhancement, or intellect enhancement be seen?
(I am not fishing for a fight, just curious what people think. FWIW I say bring on all the enhancements science can provide. I wear glasses -- I'll take the rest too, thank you.)
You didn't read the article, did you?
This guy studied the optics of living human eyes, developed a 'scanner' to detect deformities, and built (as in physically and exisiting) adaptive optics that correct for the deformities that people real people can see through now with considerably greater than 10% improvement.
I don't know if this is related or not, but it would be interesting to some people.
They're going to do an operation on my eye next Thursday. In case you're not up-to-date on my life, read HaazNet's "The last seven months", which documents how the last seven months have been for me. (Not good...)
On Thursday, they will be:
- Removing a buckle from my left eye. I believe the buckle helped the retina re-attach itself.
- Possibly removing the oil from the left eye, also retina-related.
Currently, I have a bit of double vision (right eye sees fine, left eye sees a blurry version of the world that's not aligned with the right eye's input), and the left eye can actually see better than my right eye -- when I don't have my glasses on. My glasses make my left eye see worse!
So, that's what's up. Let's hope all the operations go OK!
-- haaz.
To my mind it's not the "supervision" that's exciting. It's that this gadget can actively compensate for defects in the eye. It sounds like it could deal with irregular astigmatism (perhaps caused by a botched laser surgery). At the moment, folks with irregular astigmatism are screwed. (I'm not talking about regular astigmatism which can be treated quite easily.) Adaptive optics could give these people normal vision.
I don't think it's going to be any sport that utilizes this the most. What other organization in the world would love this technology and have the money to back it up? The US military. If you can spot your enemy first, you have the advantage. It's surprising the military isn't jumping all over this already.
statistically(and all that implies) every child born after 2010 will need glass's, do to the degeneration of the gene pool.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
- The ability of the lens to focus
- The opacity of the lens
- The degree the retina can resolve
For instance, without my glasses, I have 20/15 near vision because my retina is very sensitive. However, my far vision is 20/200 because my eyeball is football shaped and cannot properly focus.All we can do with external optics is improve the ability to focus or magnify an image. The former is done with glasses, but, as mentioned in the article, can be improved up to the point of the retina's ability to resolve an image. The latter will provide super-human vision (microscopic/telscopic) but at the cost of tunnel vision and the loss of overall field of view.
Now, heat vision and x-ray vision are another matter.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
-whisper- that's how he see's dead people -/whisper
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Thus Spake ComradePenguin
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Thus Spake ComradePenguin
That, ofcourse, depends on your definition of "smart"... Personally, I define it as a cute little car that also comes as a convertable :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Looks like that's what this article was about.
But thing was I heard about this stuff ages ago, so I thought it was something new - especially since the article said "adaptive optics".
Somehow I don't think of static lenses as adaptive optics. Lenses which change their shape sound more like adaptive optics.
Cheerio,
Link.
It seems that whenever Grammar Nazi posts something, no matter how useful, it seems that the folks reading the response only read the tag line "Keeping /. free of grammatical errors for 3 years." Not to mention the fact that there are at least two replies to his reply about the oxymoron. C'mon, read the story for what it is.
Perhaps you should, rather than make a feeble and what should be horribly embarassing (who in their right mind would moderated this obvious troll up?) attempt to troll me, consult the authors of the "fortune" program that was part of the BSD games package. Perhaps they can explain how this quote made it into the fortune package that came with my Slackware 7.0.
There are two major products that come out of Berkel
I applaud your caution.
One of the things that did cross my mind after reading this was : how does this behave over time? After all the shape of different components of the human body changes rather dramatically over time. Would you have to measure the aberrations every 10 years and correct for them? Every 5 years? Every year after the age of 65? Who knows.
Another thing to consider is the degradation of color sensitivity of the human eye in old age. The gradual clouding of the ocular liquid (which in extreme cases is a cataract) is a natural process and causes a shift in the color sensitivity of the eye. The blues and the greens become barely visible, and the reds tend to dominate. It becomes very hard to distinguish a red traffic signal from a sunset background, and the green signal is barely visible. The device that is mentioned is thus going to be of limited use for the older folks.
Note that older folks have a problem with their reflex times too - which is another reason they shouldnt drive.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Before we go and start implanting ourselves with eye enhancing technology, we need to decide how far we will let this go. THe implications of replacing broken body parts and enhancing people could lead to things that are more machine than person. This could be a terrible step for the human race. This advance could lead to our species seperating into two catagories: people who have implants, and people who don't. So before we start hailing this wonderous technology, maybe we should stop for a second, and see where it will lead.
Here are some things to think about... First of all, the optical aberration of your eye is not a rapidly changing thing. The whole idea behind adaptive optics is to make rapid measurements of light propagating through a turbulent medium and compensating for this time-varying aberration in real-time. The bandwidth needed to get a decent correction through a turbulent atmosphere depends on the conditions, but is usually in the 100s of Hertz range. In the case of your eye, you do not need to have a full blown adaptive optics system. You only need to make one measurement of each eye's aberration and take the data to your local laser eye surgeon and tell him, "Here Doc, this is the wavefront measurement of my eyes. Please ablate material from my eye according to fix the aberration." No AO system is needed, just a wavefront sensor at the Doctor's office to measure how crappy your eyes are and then a good surgeon with a well calibrated laser!
These advancements are truly an amazing thing and I applaud the science behind it. With all technology, however, it has the potential to be abused.
It's a good thing bow and arrows weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have been killed.
It's a good thing stirrups weren't perfected, otherwise archers would be terribly more deadly whilst on horseback.
It's a good thing gunpowder wasn't perfected, otherwise extra thousands of people would have been killed in wars.
It's a good thing steam power wasn't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have lead a dreary existence in factories.
It's a good thing railroads weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of indians would have had their livelyhood destroyed and land stolen.
It's a good thing ships weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have drowned at sea.
It's a good thing aircraft wasn't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have been killed in aircrashes.
It's a good thing airships weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have been burned in hydrogen fires.
It's a good thing automobiles weren't invented, otherwise thousands of people would have been killed and maimed in traffic.
It's a good thing computers weren't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have suffered carpal tunnel syndrome.
It's a good thing space shuttles weren't perfected, otherwise slightly more than half a dozen would have been killed by O-ring failures.
It's a good thing slashdot wasn't perfected, otherwise thousands of people would have been died of boredom reading really stupid posts...
--
Here's my mirror
I remember how my perception of the world changed when I first put on glasses; suddenly trees had leaves! Imagine how this kind of super sight would enable natural scientists to better observe nature.
Yes, this is a scenario I think very likely - for at least the first while that adaptive optics are commercially available, they will be a status symbol of sorts, as elective/plastic surgery was in its infancy.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
It never ceases to amaze me how something stupid can proliferate. Take, for example, the following quote, which you'll find in people's signatures everywhere:
Even the quote itself is not consistant and is sometimes written:
The quote is usually attributed to "J.S. Anderson" or "Jeremy S. Anderson".
The problem here is that both quotes are ncorrect. First, LSD did not come from Berkeley. LSD was developed in Sandoz labs in Basel, Switzerland. Second, BSD did come from Berkeley, but it is not "Unix". "Unix" was until recently a trademark of AT&T. I believe the Santa Cruz Operation is the most recent holder of the trademark. BSD is a UNIX flavour but is not Unix.
This is probably a case of false authority syndrome. Did anyone think to question this "J.S. Anderson" or his credentials? Does anyone know who he is now? Do people question the validity of his statement before putting it in their signature files? Who is J.S. Anderson anyway? If you search for the name "Jeremy S. Anderson" on the web, all you will find are quote pages containing the aforementioned misinformed quote. For all we know, Jeremy S. Anderson might not even be a real person.
Knowing all of this, then, what would possess people to put a false statement from someone they don't know at the bottom of all their email or usenet posts without questioning it at all?
source
"Let me open these blinds so the snipers can see in." - Kevin Giffhorn
Adaptive optics was first developed by the US Military (the Air Force to be specific) who was certainly looking up in the sky with telescopes, but not necessarily at the heavens.
The difficulty of astronomical adaptive optics, in which the phase distortion in an image incurred during transmission throught the atmosphere is removed, is that the atmosphere is such a dynamic thing, and the phase corrections needed must be continuously modified. From this article, on the other hand, I gather the trick in this device is to create a static phase modification (i.e. flexible mirror) that reverses the aberration caused by the imperfaction in a persons retina. Less difficult problem, but less to be gained as compared to the benefits of doing AO on huge telescopes.
At least that's my take on it
Scotch
XML causes global warming.
I remember the first time I put my new glasses on... Wow! Trees have leaves! Not just a blurry shade of green :)
I found this out when I was 12 and had my eye exam results explained. I could read the bottom line of the eye chart without squinting. Turns out 20/20 is the average result for "perfect" vision. It is possible to see better than that naturally. My uncle had 20/15 vision, and I wound up with 20/10 vision. I can make out the leaves of a tree at 1000 yards. And the gent that remarked about better focus bringing better dark vision is right. I was recruited by my ophthalmologist for a study about human vision. It's all related. God gifted me with wonderful eyes, and I sit here staring at a computer screen every day... Ain't life a hoot?
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Personally, I'm going to hold out until the X-ray surgery becomes available.
Has anyone thought about the effects that these types of surgeries will have on athletes? Will the Olympic shooting/archery/whatever committees have to ban this type of surgery to keep people equal. Does this mean that a person won't be able to compete if their vision was only corrected to 20/20? This is a whole new can of worms.
Keeping
Oil of Olay, Maybelline and the other cosmetics companies will definitely be investing in this technology. "In these days of bionic vision a woman can't get by with just ordinary makeup. She needs something that can hide even the tiniest of facial lines. That's why you need..."
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Didn't you notice the big weird glasses worn by the kid on The Sixth Sense?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Not Rob, more than one of the staff posts stories here.
Ah,well I know what you are really up to Rob!You're going to get these implants,become a Borg,and assimilate us into your cult of personality!I knew it!CmdrTaco is part the world's second biggest conspiracy!(We all know that the largest is the GNUist....oops
George
This is truly revolutionary," says MacRae, who is writing a book on such research, which he calls "the quest for super vision."
.. I thought most people had some sort of supervision..
Supervision, eh?
I know I am supervised..
--
Delphis
From reading the articles I got the impression that the technique was going to be designed so that you can go into the eye doctor's office and can get specially designed glasses. According to the article it says that the researcher was able to map the interior of the eye in greater detail than was previously possible.
Also, he also was able to discern many more defects in the eye than what are commonly treated today (astigmatism, defocus). So basically a big bonus for most of us is in that you will be able to go to the doctor's office, use the laser mapping system and get a pair of glasses that conforms to your eye's particular problems. It also removes most of the subjective thought required when getting glasses. No more trying to decide which lense you 'think' you can see better with. It all gets mapped out with the laser scan. And since glasses can correct people's vision to 20/20 from 20/40, 20/60, etc. This technique might be used to 'correct' people's vision to an even greater degree, maybe 20/10 with corrective lenses. Although for this it might require the actual adaptive optics to be used to see with however. Though the greatest benefit for this technology would be the greater accuracy in treating vision problems.
-- Wolfpup
-- Wolfpup
"A man whose circumstances went beyond his control." -- Styx
ugh?
Yeah, I almost proposed something about stopping the technology.
Come to think of it, I almost stated that, "it would screw up sports," too.
Perhaps you should help me straighten my priorities, since you are so forthright in creating my priorities.
Keeping
Hell, this project at the MIT Media Lab wedged a camera, speaker, and enough compute power to recognize and translate 40 words of American Sign Language into a baseball cap. In 1997!
I give it five years, max.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The syntax is: xx/yy where xx is always the distance that subject can see at. This is normally 20. yy is what distance the 'Normal' can see the same thing as the subject can see.
;) - Ok, bad pun.
Examples:
20/20 = Subject can see at 20ft what 'Normal' can see at 20ft. (Normal vision)
20/15 = (Me before chemical burns on cornea) Subject can see at 20ft what 'Normal' can see at only 15ft. (Better than normal)
20/400+ = (Me after chemical burns on cornea) Subject can see at 20ft what 'Normal' can see at 400ft.
20/25 = (Me after cornea damage healed with little scar tissue) Subject can see at 20ft what 'Normal' can see at 25ft.
I hope this is 'clear'.
Gas-Perm contacts work fine, for now.
--
But I thought it was 20 point font at 20 feet.
No?
Otherwise what's normal?
Malk-a-mite
My posts are slowly catching up to the number of my rejected story submissions
(smartass remark)
shouldn't that be grammatical errors?
(/smartass remark)
This is the solution, I got them to work (beta version of course). I'm spending my day at the mall tommorow.
I'm now working on adapting the optics to my digital camera, then after that, I will make the modifications to my web cam at the gym.
Fight Spammers!
Way to see the upside of things ...
My entire family went overseas to a lab in asia and got all our eyes corrected. My father was wearing trifocals before the visit, and now has approximately 20/10 vision. I have the same, and I was legally blind before the visit.
While it is definately a neat approach to doing this, where I went they did a computer scan of the light bouncing off of your retina (sounds a lot like what they claim to do in this story), but then rather than mess with mirrors, they just used the computer to generate and ideal laser pattern to eliminate all irregularities.
Not only was it fast and easy (an outpatient procedure), but it worked wonderfully. And it was cheaper than traditional laser surgery in the US (cheaper than the US versions of both Lasik and PRK). As a form of PRK treatment, it took three days to fully restore vision, but the doctor had done around 4300 operations and had no patients walk out with worse than 20/30 vision. Most came out with 20/10 as we did.
Now if only you didn't have to fly to Asia to get cutting edge healthcare... ;/
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
I think I'm going to have to hold out until they develop the X-ray eyes laser surgery. Just call me old-fashioned.
~ Yes, that's my real name.
It's shameful, really.
I remember I had an interesting article on this very topic on my web site, which also happens to be THE internet source for home-made moonshine and other fine products.
Web site whores like that should be shot.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
I'll have to start a metaSlashdot so I can give Slashdot a (+1, Funny)
This calls for a Haiku:
I can see much more
With my bionic peepers
Voyeurism's fun.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Not really, the world is still at a much higher resolution than we are currently viewing it at. It would have to get a _lot_ crisper before things start looking worse.
Now if you are just talking about it being gross to see lots of things so clearly, well, maybe.
"I understand the whole "better than 20/20 vision" thing, but for Williams to promise that, quote, "within five years this technology will allow an average adult to stand in his back yard and scan the surface of Mars without a telescope. " Does anybody really believe this? "
Cool. Maybe we'll finaly be able to find the Mars Polar Lander!
Nope... i think people of wealth and power won't have any use for them. Though they may equip others with them.
First: there's not much advantage. The images will still be projected on the retina, which is composed of discrete sensor cells (rod and cones) of a fixed size, which is reasonably well matched to our current vision. I doubt they could consistently squeeze better than 10% sharper vision out of a pair of normal eyeballs. 'Eagle eye vision' is as much a trained processing capacity in the brain as it is a clear image on the retina.
Admittedly, one could integrate magnification into the system, but then we hit...
Second: these aren't contacts we're talking about. They'll be goggles - neither attractive nor useful for daily life. Frankly, IR vision would be more useful, and the (relatively) few peopl who own those look pathetic when they flaunt them.
(there are people with natural vision 'better than 20/20', and it's generally less useful than being double jointed)
Third: first application? Military. Count on it. Even the limited security uses will be secondary. Bausch and Lomb would love to land a DoD contract
Fourth: cultural status symbols in the long term are consistently *useless* things -- long nails, bound feet, whatever -- because the true 'status' consists of being 'important enough' that you don't need to use physical capabilities, and instead employ the capabilities of others.
'Enhanced capability' status symbols, like SUVs and HUM-Vs are generally faddish, high visibility, but almost invariably never utilized aas capabilities
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
That would probably be because the article is written in a Sans Serif font, which some browsers thoughfully seem to like to reduce as small as they can. I can't check yet, though, because the thing got Slashdotted. Maybe later.
You know, a troll would've responded with "The super-human vision is to allow him to find his penis, and the bionic claw is for... Oouuuuuuch!"
:)
But I don't want to start any trouble...
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Just what we need--another reason for our employers to skimp out and get cheapo 15" monitors instead of the nice 21" ones...
Remember, kids, it's only premarital if you plan on getting married.
Strength enhancement is here today, and most people don't think highly of it. Except those using it.
Of course, steroids must have slipped your mind. The answer is that it's seen negatively. But it's a more difficult question than most people consider. Your body produces testosterone... creatine occurs in red meat... vitamins are in most healthy food. The the more interesting question is, where are the boundries? What is enhancement?
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
"For years David has been way out in front exploring how we could enhance people's vision beyond what is normally thought of as perfect vision," says Scott MacRae, one of the world's leading cornea specialists and a widely recognized pioneer in refractive surgery.
I'd just settle for an optometrist who didn't insist on overpowering my vision in both eyes so that I can't focus in the GD'd distance. But of course, "your eyesight is supposed to be between here and here, so you need *these* glasses"... which completely disregards the fact that with less-overpowered glasses, I can take the wings off a gnat with a pistol at 500 yards.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Bummer, still too big for everyday use.
I wonder how long it will be before the ability to wear these as a pair of sunglasses.
And more importantly how will these affect people with already 20/20 vision?
Most of the articale speaks of the patients, what I'm looking forward to is people with good sight, having _great_ sight.
Malk-a-mite
My rejected slashdot submissions are out pacing my comments.
I wonder if these work both ways so I could shoot lasers out of my eyes, and have good aim to boot. :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
There are two potentially frightening prospects to these new bio-technological enhancements:
1)They will probably only be accessible by people of power and wealth.
2)They will be misused by Gov't
These advancements are truly an amazing thing and I applaud the science behind it. With all technology, however, it has the potential to be abused.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
now i can make my old 14 inch monitor seem like a 21 inch!
where do i sign up?
,
faeryman
Current laser surgery is pretty crude, though. It's not at all like refiguring a lens. It improves the lens performance at the center of the lens at the expense of introducing aberrations at the edges. In low light situations, it can significantly degrade vision (aside from cases where the surgeon just screws up).
Since older folks often can only dilate to 4-5mm instead of the 7mm in younger folks, it's often a better proposition for them.
Frankly, I wouldn't trust any surgeon with this unless I had some kind of severe problem that couldn't be corrected with glasses or contacts.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow. That's awesome. I'd probably use my 2048x1536 mode more often if I had eyesight that good. :)
I can think of another quote that shows limited forsight:
no one will ever need more that 640K
Never ask the question Why? ask Why not?
More interesting would be performing this surgery ahead of time on people without perfect vision, thus substantially increasing the base of applicants that are able to become fighter pilots.. I have the reflexes and killer instinct that I need, but I can't be one because I need glasses. ;)
Now maybe I can see my dick or toes before I die...
Damn you internet job?!@$
Damn you chinese take out?@!%#!
DontBlow.com is an absolute good.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2040u4 0uNF.html .24mm across the entire screen, enough actual resolution to properly display 2048x1536 without dropping pixels.. Only gets 78Hz at that resolution, though.. I run mine at 1600x1200x100Hz, typically.. 2048 I only use in Photoshop..
http://www.mitsubishi-display.com/products/dp20
I have one.. It's great.. flat screen,
No, schools don't make you smarter, learning form your mistakes, and the examples of others in the real world make you smarter. Schools can provide an environment for learning, and resources such as good teachers, but getting smarter is only possible when your will takes control of your mind.
--
variable contrast, so that colors and shapes are discernable in low light and bright light can be seen without glare. This is effectively what pupillary dilation and contraction do... glasses could superimpose extra iris that would cover up even more pupil than normal, but boosting incoming photons would be considerably more cumbersome.
IR/UV vision: This could be achieved with little footprint by coating the glasses with a material that absorbed the desired band and emitted visible light, Of course, you'd have to focus on the glasses, which might be strenuous...
telescopic vision: Just make the lenses flexable...
Flicker correction: I've heard some people are bothered by certain monitors, fluorescent lights, or a combination, because the refresh rate causes a subliminally perceptable flicker. Perhaps phosphorescent materials in the glasses could create a "persistence of vision" that would blur out the flashing. There would be a cost in resolution, perhaps, but it would ease a lot of headaches.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Ourageous. Why do scientists make such false and unrealistic promises just to grab publicity?
I understand the whole "better than 20/20 vision" thing, but for Williams to promise that, quote, "within five years this technology will allow an average adult to stand in his back yard and scan the surface of Mars without a telescope. " Does anybody really believe this?
And even worse, there is this later on in the article: "...eye-care giant Bausch & Lomb says once this technology matures, it will allow humans to actually see into the future with only a simple pair of contact lenses which will refract light waves from the fourth dimension... and possibly to bypass the physical realm altogether and gaze directly into a man's soul."
Come on, now. Let's at least come up with some self-cleaning contacts before we focus on this science fiction mumbo-jumbo.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
shouldn't that be grammatical errors?
(smartass reply)
It is already. You must have misread my post.
(/smartass reply)
Keeping
I want a bionic wang
That's what I want to know. Why so many people have poor vision. And apparently an increasing percentage are needing corrective optics.
Is it just because more people notice that their eyesight sucks due newer requirements in their daily activities?
Or is it because more and more people especially young children are spending much of their time looking at things just a couple of feet away?
It's a wonder that while our eyes actually grow and develop, most of us can continue to actually focus on things. But there doesn't seem to be much information on how this works and how to improve things or fix it when it's broken. e.g. are there feedback mechanisms so that as an eyeball grows, the lens grows in various ways so that it can be flatter, and how is that done?
Cheerio,
Link.
I have to disagree here... the world looks much better to me with my glasses on.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
Whilst we wait for the /. effect to ebb, this press release might amuse you. It's from a year ago... released by both UC Berkeley and U of Chicago Both the articles are pretty much the same... you needn't hit them both.
Aparently they're both part of the same program, along with Rochester. Some interesting details, despite being a year old. Talks about forming an artificial star with a laser, too. :-)
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
try this for a view of the same article without the weird font.
Well, I understand all this vision is very cool, but what's all the hype about? I mean what would *you* do wo with an eye capable of pieR (180^) viewport and, say, x3 zoom? See the TV and the kitchen in the same time? Be able to discern if someone is home while coming towards it, yet still 600 meters (~1900 ft.) away? All those do not seem like practical uses to installing a $1,000 (presuming that's all it costs), and risk damaging your eye for. ;), and would be willing to have their 'viewports' adjusted. .
Now, I hate to be the party-pooper, but this has no uses, besides being a base for 1,000,000 other researches in the field, and promoting science, even for pilots\FBI agents\whatever you'd like to imagine, until eye surgery techniques imporved. AFAIK, there's a 10%, or 5% of failure in laser surgery. No army is going to train pilots, (Which is an extremely demanding task not anyone is capable of, and takes 2 years of nonstop training, at least in Israel), then lose 5%-10% of them because of failed eye surgeries, for means that can be achieved through another kind equipment, like a digital zoom viewport on the cockpit, or, for the cockpit-disabled, binoculars (sp?). Not to mention not all people are like you, willing to sacrifice their life for the greater good of human kind
But the claw, well, that's a whole different story =]
-Nimster
-Nimster
Your Ad Here.
I just shelled out for a pair of "Photo Chromatic" (peril sensitive ;) glasses, now I'm going to want something even cooler again...
Sure, if you measure the eye really carefully you can come up with better glasses. But I shiver at the thought of this being used for the so-called "laser eye surgery", which is referred to by its own practicioners as slash and burn. If you really looked into the way they are creating scars on the lens, etc., you'd not want that to happen to your eyes.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
It's the reinvention of the X-RAY GLASSES! You too can see through SOLID MATTER (and clothes). Improves the vision of even people with 20/20 eyesight! Impress your friends!
Now i just have one question
WHO IN THERE RIGHT MIND WOULD WANT TO SEE BETTER THAN 20/20
I mean think about it. The only reason i would see good reason for this would be for soldiers so they can see farther away without binoculrs Thank you for reading my rant
With good glasses, I can see better than 20/20. For me, it's a matter of whenever I look at anything less than my norm, I get massive headaches because of the eyestrain and brainache involved (my brain actively complains that things are out of focus that should be in sharp focus, and tries its hardest to compensate). Net result: I end up needing a lot more sleep than I should.
It's a nightmare I live with every day. But when it comes down to it; why shouldn't you want to be able to see a road sign half a mile a way - and still be able to read it? Or a car license plate at triple the passing-distance for the driving test? Or even to be able to read really tiny text without invoking manual zoom (bringing it up to your eyeball).
SImon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
God bless you, MortimerK! You're right on the money.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Wow, so once I get this, will I be able to crank my monitor resolution up to 15000 x 12000 and still read the text? Ahhhh......imagine the desktop space.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
It says in the article why enhanced vision is a Good Thing. Night vision. To paraphrase Apple: "When it's dark, normal vision sucks rhinos. Enhanced vision sucks less."
(Okay, now the thread is officially Kosher)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
I wonder if in theory they could use the measurements to smooth out all the imperfections, presumably using laser surgery, and permanently give you the super vision.
Almost certainly. (At least for one focus distance, and probably near-ideal for most of the range of focus.)
All the mirror is doing is temporarily removing the eye's deviation from an ideal lens. Laser surgery should be able to permanently remove the imperfections (at least in one layer of the lens system), producing the equivalent of the mirror + eye system without the mirror.
This would be equivalent to having perfect eyes (or very close) - not the approximation the meat machine (even in its best incarnations) comes with. That would be the best that could be done with an eye that size, made of those materials. You might be able to do slightly better by separately perfecting both the lens and the cornea.
Now you could probably get better yet by substituting other materials (or a multi-lens mix of them) to get less chromatic abberation, or to focus better over a broader range of distances. And of COURSE you could do better by making the eye bigger. But it is interesting to see that the "stock" eye averages far enough from perfect that a very noticable improvement can be made by reshaping it (or the virtual equivalent).
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I think golf is the sport that would benefit the most.
For amateurs, it will mean fewer lost balls, and pros it will help reading greens.
it think my handicap would be 5 strokes better if I could see what I was doing. Putting in particular is hopeless for me.
I just got new glasses after two years, and they (were when I got them) as good as could be -- my vision was limited not by fuzziness, but by smallness of the object. The problem was that I got sensory overload looking at anything more than twenty feet away, which had been fuzzed out, and now was super-high-fidelity.
On the other hand, I really did feel superhuman for being able to read the fine print on bumper stickers on the cars ahead of me. But my head hurt intermittently, and my eyes seem to now have adjusted back to slightly-fuzzy. Oh well, I'll just get replacement pieces when they're available.
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A 'stock eye' does not average less then perfect, and average eye IS perfect, because in eyesight perfect is defined as the average.
This is why people with 20/10 vision are said to have better then perfect vision (colder then absolute zero, below the baseline, I know I know).
Now what I want is broad spectrum eyesight..IR, maybe a bit of UV...
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Personally, I'm going to hold out until the X-ray surgery becomes available.
I think you mean something else, cause there are big troubles constructing lenses and mirrors for X-rays. The best X-ray mirrors of today have a reflectance of around 10%, the rest goes right through. Imagine what a constant flow of X-rays could do to your brain ;)
Besides, there are not much to see in X-ray frequencies unless you emit X-rays youself... that's how they do it at the dentist's; X-ray emission on one side of your tooth, and a film on the other side.
I am slightly near sighted, not enough to warrant the inconvenience of glasses or contacts.
I love photography because my camera sees a sharper, more colorful world than I do.
Ryan
Check out the similar article here if you can't get to the sciencedaily site. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/s upervision060900.html
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What I really want is the ability to see infrared and ultraviolet via contact lenses, on demand of course.
I find it ironic that an article written about superhuman vision is done in such a small font. Maybe it's my browser though.