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Coming Soon, Super Vision
lil_nohreaga writes "Wired is reporting that several companies are developing electronically controlled lenses to provide enhanced vision. From the article: Thanks to technologies created for astronomical telescopes and spy satellites, aberrometers can map a person's eye with extreme accuracy. Lasers bounce off the back of the eyeball, and structures in the eye scatter the resulting beam of light."
Imagine what a rifle scope built with this technology would do for Soldiers on the battlefield. Well-aimed fire is one of the primary factors that decides who wins in a firefight. The military would definitely profit from wide-spread use of super vision lenses.
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Because holograms only work at one wavelength.
I think (some) people are getting a bit too excited about this without considering the downsides. It's already possible to give people much-greater-than-average vision using laser eye surgery, and has been for a while, but it's not usually done, simply because those it was found out that when your vision is *too* good, it'll start to irritate you after a while - you'll get headaches, dizzy spells etc.
So... superhuman vision might be useful on occasion, for short periods of time, but if you think that we're all gonna wear contacts that will literally give us a hawk's vision in 20 years, think again. It won't happen.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Andreas Dreher, the company's CEO, says the lenses won't likely improve vision beyond 20/20, but they provide better contrast and less double vision than traditional lenses. So exactly what is this super vision you speak of, better contract and less double vision? I think super vision would be more like seeing microscopic or magnafying.
Using wavefront sensors to fully characterize your eye is not new. LASIK patients get that treatment now -- you look into an autocollimator that includes a Shack-Hartmann sensor, and it reads out all the high-order aberrations in your eye. The LASIK treatment then gets rid of all those aberrations, so that after correction your eye could in principle be "perfect" -- limited only by quantum uncertainty of the photons entering your pupil.[In practice that's not the case, because the act of cutting your cornea and letting it heal introduces a low level of new aberrations that weren't present when your eye was characterized in the first place].
If wavefront sensing is so easy and painless, why don't we all have super-duper glasses to fix our vision? Historically, it's because high order lenses are hard to grind, but more recently it's because your glasses can't be aligned with your eye very well. You could make high-order corrective glasses out of the usual glass or polycarbonate or whatever, but they would only work if you looked straight through them: if you turned your eyes to look sideways, the corrective aberrations in the lenses would no longer line up with the aberrations in your cornea, and your vision would be worse than with conventional glasses. If you have astigmatism you can get that effect now by turning your glasses 90 degrees as you look through them: at 90 degree rotation, the cylindrical correction actually worsens your astigmatism rather than correcting it. high order terms are more sensitive to angular and positional alignment.
Contact lenses are better since they are attached to your cornea and therefore stay approximately aligned -- but they're not affixed to your eye, they sort of drift around in there. That's one reason that astigmatic contacts (a relatively new product, BTW) are only available in 10 degree increments of correction angle -- they don't line up any better than that. The only thing that stays really fixed relative to your cornea is, well, your cornea -- which is why high-order correction is feasible for LASIK.
So to make your super-duper glasses work right you would have to mount a small camera under the frame, pointed back at your eye. The camera would have to back out the motion of the eye and correct the active pixels in the lens as you looked around. That may be what these guys are doing, but TFM didn't mention it. Without that sort of feedback, high order correction isn't likely to work well.
BTW, wavefront sensors appear like magic to lots of folks but they aren't. Those eye autofocusers at the optometrist work by autocollimation: if your eye is perfectly focused, then a beam coming in should be focused to a single point on the retina, and scattered light from the retina should then be refocused into a beam that goes straight back where it came from. The autocollimator adjusts an external lens assembly until the beam coming back out of your eye is nice and clean. Wavefront sensors use a bug-eye lens to produce (say) 25 little images, each of which records the beam coming out of a small patch of your pupil. If the eye is in focus, then all the little images should line up. If it's not, then they are misaligned. It's that simple.
There was a time when Wired was a OK place to get tech news. That time is ended.
To quote the first graph of the TFA. "... About twice a year, he would encounter a patient whose eyesight was better than 20/20. Such cases of super vision were a phenomenon that Blum and the science of opthalmology couldn't explain."
We all know that 20/20 means the test subject can see at 20 ft what a person of normal vision can see at 20 feet. We also know there are a lot of people who can't see as well as a person with normal vision. Is it so much of a strech of the imagination that there will be some people who do see better than normal to call it super vision?
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
The concept you describe is good, but your suggested implementation (open wide to zoom in, squint to zoom out) is the reverse of what one does naturally. When I squint, it is usually an attempt to see something better.
On a related tangent, there's a guy at the University of Toronto (Steve Mann) who's been working on wearable computers for decades. If what he claims is true*, he controls the computer in part through a sensor which picks up his eye movements, allowing him to manipulate menues projected onto (or perhaps through?) his glasses.
* I had the opportunity to try on his computer-enhanced glasses once. I didn't see any menues... just some fuzzy green numbers off to one side, with no really evident UI. He claimed before lending the glasses to me that he was watching a movie. Who knows... the guy does have a reputation for being a little nutty.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
I'm curious as to whether or not having a real-time correction brings any real improvement in vision correction. Are cornea aberrations a realtime problem? If not, is a pixelated lens superior to an high-precision lens of some stable material?
I know that the advantage Othonix glasses offer is that they use adaptive optics (a laser and wavefront sensor) to identify a prescription for your vision that is much more accurate than the techniques currently in use at most optometrists. This allows more precise measurement of low-order aberrations, and begins to address the higher-order zernike modes (up to the 11th I think). Opthonix also has some technology for taking said prescription and grinding a lens- but all you are talking about here is a pair of glasses that have a MUCH more precise prescription than was possible before.
It's good to hear about these developments, because correcting the wavefront of the light entering your eye is guaranteed to avoid introducing any error to your cornea, whereas a lot of forms of eye surgery introduce deformity to your vision that might in the long run be harder to correct.
The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. -Yeats, The Second Coming
The reason why all your ideas have not been realised is economical: It makes sense to develop a very expensive piece of technology that can help a lot of people, thereby bringing the price per treatment into an acceptable range. However, it doesn't make sense (yet) to use such complicated technologies to clean windshields because nobody is prepared to pay 200 k$ for a windshield cleaner (while a specialised ophthalmologist would certainly be prepared to pay as much for such a machine).
:-) It's even more a pity that this press release is available in German only. Believe me, this is serious business.
This technology is certainly no "pie in the sky". It's actually quite close to the market. I'd send you to this site, but it seems they spend more time on developing their machines than updating their site.
Squinting to zoom in is fine... except for the fact that it's also what you do naturally when confronted with a bright light. I don't know about you, but if something's blinding me, the last thing I want to do is increase my magnification of it.
My understanding of wave physics is that there aren't many effects that are only applicable to a single frequency of a wave. There's certainly a most efficient frequency of the effect, but it should work to a diminishing degree on frequencies around it. So it's a start.
:p
Actually, holograms are specific to one frequency because a hologram is an interference pattern stored inside a film (it works almost like an XOR). So if you have A (light) and B (image), and you make C (hologram) then when you take A and C together again you get B. The reason this doesn't work on multiple wavelengths is because the interference patterns are different. I'm a little "fuzzy" (ok bad pun) on what the original person was using for a lens (if he was using the hologram film itself to make a molding of a lens or using it as the actual lens), but if he was using the hologram as a lens then it would work only at that frequency.
Another thing to consider is that we can't acutally "see" radiation unless it is headed directly at our eyes. If we designed and implemented hologram lenses that work for the three frequencies that our eyes can detect, what's to say that your eyes are exactly calibrated to the same wavelengths as mine? Biology has a funny way of aberrations, but 10nm in either direction would still make you see "blue" but the holograms wouldn't work for you as they would for me. You'd have to calibrate the holograms for the wavelengths for that specific person. Yet, how would you know what those are? The only way we can "see" colors is on a relative basis. There are no hex codes between our optic nerve and our brain, and modern wavelength filtes aren't precise enough to allow just one frequency to pass. Sorry, this is probably way off topic
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting." --Ernest Rutherford
Well, I keep noticing that most of the doctors I see performing LASIK, are all themselves wearing GLASSES.
That kind of scares me away from doing it to myself....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........