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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."
Other potential applications of this technology include the ability to help people with retinal degenerative diseases prolong their useful vision by dynamically mapping projections of images to other areas of the retina that are not affected by degeneration. Of course this will do nothing for the degenerative process, but it could buy some folks a bit more time until we can perfect retinal interventions (biological and/or bionic) to rescue vision loss.
As an aside, this technology to measure the optics of the eye is currently used in many procedure to correct vision such as in LASIK. You can read a little bit about LASIK and see a movie of the procedure here.
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Guess it's time to throw away those X-ray glasses I got by saving a bazillion bazooka chewing gum comics.
Would your eyes (or brain) adapt to that making your vision much worse when you're not wearing these "enhanced" glasses? (In much the same way as increasing eyeglass prescriptions cause your eyesight to deteriorate further and increase your prescription again.)
:)
I suppose it's only a matter of time before they make it so the thing is in your eye all the time (in contacts or implant form - I wonder if it could emit a red light to those looking at you?
FTA "Nobody has begged us to let them see a road sign two miles earlier." This kind of limited thinking is so rampant that this guy actually uttered this comment without any hesitation. The successful companies create products that enhance people's lives BEFORE they are begged. They create new technologies and then find applications.
The goggles, they do nothing!
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
But what sound did Steve Austin's eye make, again?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Reading the article, I find it very "pie in the sky". It stands to reason that if we have the ability to produce this sort of technology, then we're really behind in so many other areas by comparison. If we can make "pixelated lenses", then why don't we have car windows that automatically darken when sunlight gets too bright? If we can determine the abberations of a person's eye in such a small form factor, then why can't a car tell when the driver is squinting and only darken the glass where the light source that is causing the squinting is coming through? If all of this stuff can be done in such a small form factor, then why don't we have a market for "winter helmets" in cold regions that users can wear to warm their faces with heated air, play digital music via a bluetooth link from the music player in their pockets, provide a heads up display with newsticker, external temperature and wind speed, and the current track playing, and track eye movements for interacting with the music player, cellphone or PDA? That sounds technically feasible and would appeal to lots of people in areas where it gets cold in the Winter. Even more to the point, why do we have windsheild wipers when it would be possible to create a grid around a windsheild that blows hot dry air or possibly a laser grid to just melt snow and ice on contact? To me, all the applications I just came up with are in the same league with what this guy proposes. And I think his idea is much more far fetched than my own.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Specifically, I wanted to bring up an unrelated topic...so mod me offtopic now. I recall some years ago a presentation by a researcher where they had made a hologram of a lens, corrected by some program to delete the flaws in the glass of the original optics. It was perfectly flat, and had a decent magnification power. To that end, I wonder; is this technology the final result of that one? And, if it is, why aren't they using the converse (making better lenses out of holograms) to make optically corrected contact lenses, and replacement corneas?
I'm just wondering...
Remove the spamfreak to speak.
It'll still never help my wife see reason...
Lasers bounce off the back of the eyeball,
WARNING: Do not look directly into laser with remaining good eye!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Lister: Any problems? ... closer, hmm, to the object. All right, okay. Well, what about other optical effects, like split screen, slow motion, Quantel(tm)?
Kryten: Well, just one or two. In fact I've compiled a little list if you'll indulge me. Now then, uh, my optical system doesn't appear to have a zoom function.
Lister: No, human eyes don't have a zoom.
Kryten: Well then, how do you bring a small object into sharp focus?
Lister: Well, you just move your head closer to the object.
Kryten: I see. Move your head
Lister: No. We don't have them.
Kryten: You don't have them -- just the zoom? Hmm. Well, no, that's fine, that's great, no, no, that's really great, that's great. Now then, my nipples don't work.
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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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I can imagine some serious eyestrain coming about if your eye has different ideas to the 'smart lens' about what is supposed to be in focus. The fovea (small area of retina that receives the focussed image) is pretty small. You try to focus on a roadsign 400metres away - the super lenses think you're looking at a tree 500metres away. Hellish biofeedback loop ensues. It's giving me a headache just to think about it...
Hmmmm. You go first. :)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The technology is still improving so I always tell my friends they might want to hold off on "getting etched" unless they just can't stand the contacts anymore. Might as well get the best possible correction.
What makes me wonder about this article is that although the PR makes it sound like these lenses move around while you're wearing them, I see nothing that actually says that. The other company doing "optimized" optics seems to just grind a lense based on scans. So does that mean you have to hold your eyes steady? If so I think I'll wait until they get something that dynamically tracks the eye before I get what would be for me a cosmetic product.
For that matter, maybe I'll wait until they have a switch-on binocular/microscope mode built in too.
Someone had to do it.
Can they make the girl look the the same in the morning as she did in the club last night? Please tell me I'm not the only one with that issue...
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.
If your sight is 20/40 or better, you can already get enhanced vision as high as 20/10 or 20/15 with Lasik. Some doctors even specialize in vision enhancement for professional athletes. Many golfers and baseball players (most notably Tiger Woods) have had their vision enhanced, with real results.
So why is Lasik ok while Steroids aren't (there's little or no medical evidence supporting the idea that steroids are harmful when used properly).
Here's an article that ran on Slate during the congressional hearings on steroid use - http://www.slate.com/id/2116858/ Buckle up, sports fans, there are all kinds of elective surgeries in the works to improve human performance. I guess as long as you don't inject yourself, anything goes!
You suddenly and inexplicably become unrecognizable as your alter ego.
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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.
they teach you a bit about the mechanics of shooting (zeroing the rifle, holding steady, leading a moving target, estimating bullet drop, etc.) but a lot of what you learn is how to gauge distance and wind. There are a number of ways to gauge each (in the desert, the wind affects the "heat shimmers" you see in the air; in open field terrain, grass etc. moves in the breeze). This is the most difficult part of shooting well at extreme distances, because across long distances the wind may differ between the shooter and target.
.50 caliber jobs you need for really long-range shooting, anyway. The classes were intense and very interesting in an abstract fashion. Fortunately, I was never called on to put any of this knowledge to practical applciation.
The Army's standard-issue sniper rifles aren't the
And as the parent says, close combat in cities (MOUT--Military Operations in Urban Terrain) moots most extreme long distance shooting. There's just too much maneuver for a sniper to be effective from a fixed postion with a long view.
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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?