Scratched glasses give perfect vision for any eyesight
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
So New Scientist got it wrong when telling startup was founded just now to commercialize it.
I wonder why it didn't catch on (if this approach is really so good). It does sound a bit "too good to be true".
I imagine this is yet another theoretical result that turned out to have serious obstacles to a useful implementation. (See also all the "cures for cancer" that are constantly being announced.) Still, assuming it isn't some kind of fraud, the idea is amazing.
Additionally, it may not work with just anyone's eyes. For example, I remember a study in which scientists fitted a test subject with lenses that flipped the image upside down, and their brain started adjusting the image within a few weeks. Also I know a person who wears two different contacts, one in their left eye for far sight, and another in their right eye for near sight, and she says that this allows her to see both near and far just fine.
But not everyone can do this without getting a headache, eye strain, etc, and from the article it appears that part of the operation is that one's brain has to adjust to process the image. It may be that this scratched groove system isn't quite compatible with everyone. And even if one does manage to retrain their brain to the new system, what happens when you take the glasses off? In the study I mentioned earlier, after the test subject retrained their brain to see correctly while wearing lenses that turned things upside down, when they took the glasses off everything appeared upside down to them.
So the glasses might have a similar effect if they rely as heavily on brain adaptation as I suspect they do.
the interference pattern tends to cancel out some of the light passing through the lens, which reduces the contrast of images viewed through it.
The example image also shows this effect.
The claim is that:
the brain adapts to and minimises the reduced contrast within a few seconds.
My point was that this adaptation may not work for everyone or may not be comfortable. Also when the glasses are taken off do your eyes have to readjust to normal contrast?
It seems to me that the given explanation ("patterns of both constructive and destructive interference") would depend strongly on the exact frequency of the light. So maybe it is not correctly stated.
However, the basic claim seems accurate. Here is Zalevsky's paper:
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=ol-35-18-3066
You have to pay to get the full text, but the abstract says:
> This technology is capable of simultaneously correcting all refractive errors, such as myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia, regular/irregular astigmatism, as well as their combinations.
My goodness.
Curiously, the abstract suggests that this idea is "designed to employ neural adaptation processes". It also says that the effect "is achieved by exploiting the capacity of the visual system for adaptation to contrast".
Wow.
Sounds like the glasses from The Jerk.
One wonders if too much reliance on "adaptations of the visual system" is going to cause problems. For example, will you wind up training your brain in such a fashion that you'll need several hours or days of retraining to see with your glasses off? Visual processing is famously plastic, but one wonders what the timescale of the plasticity is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_glasses
It sounds like this new product has a similar set of advantages and drawbacks, and maybe even works in a similar fashion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_contrast_microscopy
The basic concept of phase contrast is that certain objects (notably, monolayers of biological specimens) don't greatly affect the amplitude of light passing through them. IOW, viewed under "normal" optics, they would appear transparent.
On the other hand it was noticed that these objects do cause the phase of light to shift as it passes through the specimens. The basic idea is that you create a system that has light passing through the specimen in two paths. The major light path is dimmed and accelerated by half a wavelength. This gives us a situation of theoretically perfect destructive interference at the point of observation. When the reference light waves pass through a phase object, it changes the phase of the light and introduces perturbances to the completely destructive interference which results in an observable image of the specimen.
The reason these glasses remind me of phase contrast is the concentric circles milled to specific depths and widths (which is one of two important pieces of a phase contrast microscope, the objective). Also, the article describes the effects based in terms of phase:
The rings shift the phase of the light waves passing
through the lens, leading to patterns of both
constructive and destructive interference. Using a
computer model to calculate how changes in the diameter
and position of the rings alter the pattern, Zalevsky
came up with a design that creates a channel of
constructive interference perpendicular to the lens
through each of the 25 structures. Within these
channels, light from both near and distant objects is
in perfect focus.
[ed: speling]
I use glasses in the evening and contacts in the morning, so the dimming could perhaps be beneficial for circadian rhythms if I need to use a computer, although I recognize that probably has more to do with the spectrum of light than the intensity.
That said, I'd still be curious to see how it looks...
Good point. Using this technology might have all kinds of unexpected effects on life.
It's possible that being able to actually see it simultaneously will make a big difference, but it's possible that much of it won't be that noticeable, because it'll just be implementing in hardware what we can already composite in "software" fairly well. Although, I can imagine one difference might be at wildly different focus depths, e.g. when I'm sitting at my desk, I don't simultaneously perceive my monitor and the tree 100ft away out the window as being in focus. It's hard to say, because there's also a center-of-vision / peripheral-vision distinction involved there, which would still exist even if all distances were simultaneously in focus.
Of course, since we see in stereo, images will still only be aligned when we're looking at them with both eyes. And our eyes really only see detail in a tiny area (a few degrees). Having everything in focus is a negligible gain over having all distances you look at in focus.
I'm not sure that this is possible. Even if the lens system allows it, your retina isn't.
"Fixed in a pair of glasses, the lenses would not move as the eye looked in different directions, so the focusing effect would be lost in the regions between the circles. But Zalevsky says that the eye learns to fill in the gaps as it moves from one engraved structure to another, generating a continuous effect."
This implies to me that once they cleverly figure out how to embed this tech in something like a contact lens, it wouldn't have to "fill in the gaps" and would grant perfect vision in the full vision field. Wild.
Maybe. I have my doubts, though. The abstract to Zalevsky's paper (see my comment on this HN post) ends as follows:
> This is achieved by exploiting the capacity of the visual system for adaptation to contrast as well as its capability of creating a coherent continuous visual field out of discrete lines of sight.
So simply focusing light on the retina is apparently not the goal. Rather, it appears that the brain is being sent unusual signals, which it is nonetheless capable of interpreting. In other words, there isn't just optics going on here; there is also some interesting neurology.
> Wild.
Indeed.
Read about this mind-blowing experiment, where vision was inverted:
Seriously, it does remind me a bit of Turbosound's polyhorn system, see page 8 here: http://bit.ly/dxEYrB
I'm talking more about music venues, and the dream of being able to hear the performance as clearly at the side of the room as in the exact middle, or wherever the engineer has put the "sweet spot," which is analogous to focal length but not exactly the same concept.
Though that seems unlikely given the presence of reflections. Even this system does not promise equal intensity, just equal divergence.
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
about how to check out reports about supposed scientific findings to see if the reports are really accurate.
I would think so. However, it looks like the idea is not just to focus the light. There's some interesting neurology going on, too. (See my other comments to this post.)
"Sounds similar to pinhole glasses. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_glasses
Pinhole glasses do work, and they work regardless of your level of myopia.
"The immediate problem I see with this is that people can already see with their distance correction anything that is 33cm (83.82")(6.9 ') from their eyes to infinity. The problem that bifocals fix is the distance from 20" to the eyes or near vision! I don't know if this person is over 40 or not, but if so he should realize this. This type of technology is similar to what a progressive or "no-line" bifocal does at present."
Speaking of augmenting our sensory capabilities, has there ever been any work done on making hearing a voluntary sense? Always-on hearing had some evolutionary advantage in the past but it may be an interesting experiment to put this in one's own control.
Kidding aside, really good earplugs, the kind they wear where really loud machinery is in operation, effectively gives you that. Get the foam one that you roll between your fingers to squish them and then they expand to fill your ear canal. They block out a lot of noise.
So was the novelty of it all putting them on eye glasses ?