Super Vision Sans Bionics

By Sam Jaffe

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.”