Sometimes it’s useful to try and imagine other people’s points of view. Literally! In this video, Pablo Artal, Professor of Physics at the University of Murcia in Spain, gives a nice demo of what certain eye defects, like myopia or cataracts, do to a person’s vision.
Pablo works in vision research and uses a laboratory adaptive optics system to show the effects of vision defects on what people see. Originally developed by the US military, adaptive optics is used in astronomy to remove the image blur caused by turbulence in the atmosphere. A very cool spin-off of the technology is its use in ophthalmological research, where AO has allowed super detailed imaging of the human retina.
In this demo, rather than remove aberrations, Pablo uses an AO simulation setup to introduce them. This lets you, quite literally, see the world through someone else’s eyes.
Pablo blogs at Optics Confidential, where he answers questions on his research, scientific careers and life in general. His blog posts are also sent to Researchblogging.org. He has a cute puppy and a cat. What’s not to like? Go check it out.
By the way, making funky optical aberrations with a deformable mirror is a really fun game to play for a few hours. If you have access to a deformable mirror and some optics, lock the door, switch off the lights, put on your safety goggles and off you go. I also love the way that university optics labs seem to be universally messy – check out all that crap in the background! But after spending 10^x hours in a dark room aligning a big optical setup, even the cockroaches have to be kept in position so as not to lose the perfect image. An overzealous cleaner can literally set a student back by 6 months. So the rubbish stays!
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