Before he became an inventor
and businessman, Ron Blum was a practicing opthalmologist. 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.

"I would just say to the person: Consider yourself blessed," says
Blum. "I never would have believed that I would be running a company 20
years later that was developing a product that could give supervision
to anyone."

That company, PixelOptics
of Roanoke, Virginia, just won a $3.5 million Department of Defense
grant to refine its "supervision" technology, which Blum claims could
double the quality of a person’s eyesight. "Theoretically, this should
be able to double the distance that a person can see clearly," he says.

At the heart of PixelOptics’ technology are tiny,
electronically-controlled pixels embedded within a traditional eyeglass
lens. 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.

Blum hopes to have a working prototype within a year that is built to military specifications.

Other researchers are even closer to selling lenses based on adaptive optics. Ophthonix
in San Diego has already sold thousands of the lenses in California,
and expects to roll out its product soon. 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.
In studies the company conducted, drivers using the lenses could
identify a pedestrian three-tenths of a second sooner than when wearing
conventional lenses.

"The response from customers is that they can see better," says CEO
Andreas Dreher, who questions the practicality of PixelOptics’ aim of
improving vision beyond 20/20. "Nobody has begged us to let them see a
road sign two miles earlier."

Blum agrees that improving upon 20/20 vision isn’t an end in itself.
But people likely can’t conceive of the results they might get with his
company’s technology. For example, slight changes in lighting and air
pressure can trigger pixels to reprogram, powered by a computer built
into the spectacle frames.

"Most higher-order abnormalities impact vision only under certain
conditions," he says. "We can adjust dynamically to those conditions,
which makes a big difference in your ability to see."

More here.