Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Smart lenses for super vision
"Ron Blum is an ophthalmologist who is developing eyeglass lenses that apparently can give the wearer super vision. The system is based on "intelligent" lenses made up of electronically-controlled "pixels" that can be discretely adjusted. Blum claims that his PixelOptics lenses will not only correct the wearer's vision but could also boost it to better than 20/20, possibly even better than 20/10. Blum's company just scored a $3.5 million Department of Defense grant to build a prototype that he hopes will be ready in a year. From Wired News:
"Theoretically, this should be able to double the distance that a person can see clearly," (Blum) says...
Technicians scan the eyeball with an aberrometer -- a device that measures aberrations that can impede vision -- and then the pixels are programmed to correct the irregularities.
Traditional glasses correct lower-order aberrations like nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatisms. PixelOptics' lenses handle higher-order aberrations that are much more difficult to detect and correct.
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.
Software reads the scattered beam and creates a map of the patient's eye, including tiny abnormalities such as bumps, growths and valleys. The pixelated eyeglass lens is then tuned to refract light in a way that corrects for those high-level aberrations.