What Telescope Needed to Have a "Contact Lens" Added?
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A Telescope For Your Eye: New Contact Lens Design May Improve Sight of Patients with Macular Degeneration
Slimmed-downward telescopic contact lens switches between magnified and normal vision using a modified pair of liquid crystal eyeglasses
Five views of the switchable telescopic contact lens. a) From front. b) From back. c) On the mechanical model eye. d) With liquid crystal spectacles. Here, the glasses block the unmagnified central portion of the lens. due east) With liquid crystal spectacles. Hither, the cardinal portion is not blocked. Credit: Optics Express. Click to view larger images.
Images captured through the contact lens and mechanical model middle. c) Outdoor image taken with model eye alone. d) Outdoor image taken with model eye and contact lens. This image shows why each of the ii magnification states (normal and 2.8x) should be used one at a time: here, neither department of the lens is existence blocked by the glasses, and the event is an image with greatly reduced dissimilarity. due east) Outdoor image taken with simply the magnified outer portion of the contact lens (2.8x). Credit: Optics Express. Click to view larger images.
WASHINGTON, June 27, 2013—Contact lenses correct many people's eyesight simply practise nothing to better the blurry vision of those suffering from historic period-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading crusade of incomprehension amid older adults in the western globe. That's because merely correcting the eye'southward focus cannot restore the central vision lost from a retina damaged past AMD. Now a team of researchers from the Usa and Switzerland led by Academy of California San Diego Professor Joseph Ford has created a slim, telescopic contact lens that tin switch between normal and magnified vision. With refinements, the system could offer AMD patients a relatively unobtrusive fashion to enhance their vision. The team reports its work today in the Optical Social club's (OSA) open up-access journal Optics Express.
Visual aids that magnify incoming calorie-free help AMD patients see by spreading light effectually to undamaged parts of the retina. These optical magnifiers can aid patients with a diversity of important everyday tasks such as reading, identification of faces, and self-care. But these aids have not gained widespread acceptance because they either use beefy spectacle-mounted telescopes that interfere with social interactions, or micro-telescopes that require surgery to implant into the patient'south eye.
"For a visual assistance to exist accustomed it needs to exist highly user-friendly and unobtrusive," says co-author Eric Tremblay of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. A contact lens is an "attractive compromise" between the head-mounted telescopes and surgically implanted micro-telescopes, Tremblay says.
The new lens organisation adult past Ford's team uses tightly plumbing fixtures mirror surfaces to brand a telescope that has been integrated into a contact lens just over a millimeter thick. The lens has a dual modality: the center of the lens provides unmagnified vision, while the ring-shaped telescope located at the periphery of the regular contact lens magnifies the view ii.8 times.
To switch back and forth between the magnified view and normal vision, users would article of clothing a pair of liquid crystal glasses originally fabricated for viewing three-D televisions. These glasses selectively cake either the magnifying portion of the contact lens or its unmagnified center. The liquid crystals in the spectacles electrically modify the orientation of polarized light, allowing light with one orientation or the other to pass through the glasses to the contact lens.
The team tested their design both with computer modeling and by fabricating the lens. They likewise created a life-sized model eye that they used to capture images through their contact lens-eyeglasses arrangement. In constructing the lens, researchers relied on a robust material normally used in early contact lenses chosen polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). The team needed that robustness because they had to place tiny grooves in the lens to right for aberrant color caused by the lens' shape, which is designed to adapt to the man center.
Tests showed that the magnified image quality through the contact lens was clear and provided a much larger field of view than other magnification approaches, but refinements are necessary earlier this proof-of-concept system could exist used by consumers. The researchers report that the grooves used to right color had the side effect of degrading prototype quality and contrast. These grooves too fabricated the lens unwearable unless it is surrounded by a smooth, soft "skirt," something commonly used with rigid contact lenses today. Finally, the robust material they used, PMMA, is not ideal for contact lenses because it is gas-impermeable and limits wear to short periods of time.
The squad is currently pursuing a similar design that volition still be switchable from normal to telescopic vision, merely that will utilize gas-permeable materials and volition right aberrant color without the demand for grooves to bend the light. They say they hope their design will offering improved performance and better sight for people with macular degeneration, at least until a more permanent remedy for AMD is available.
"In the time to come, it will hopefully be possible to go after the cadre of the problem with effective treatments or retinal prosthetics," Tremblay says. "The platonic is actually for magnifiers to become unnecessary. Until we get in that location, notwithstanding, contact lenses may provide a way to make AMD a footling less debilitating."
Paper: "Switchable telescopic contact lens," E. Tremblay et al., Eyes Limited, Vol. 21, Issue thirteen, pp. 15980-15986 (2013).
EDITOR'S Annotation: Images are available to members of the media upon request. Contact Lyndsay Meyer, lmeyer@osa.org.
About Optics Express
Optics Express reports on new developments in all fields of optical science and technology every two weeks. The journal provides rapid publication of original, peer-reviewed papers. It is published past the Optical Society and edited past Andrew Thou. Weiner of Purdue University. Optics Express is an open-access journal and is bachelor at no price to readers online at www.OpticsInfoBase.org/OE.
About OSA
Uniting more than 180,000 professionals from 175 countries, the Optical Society (OSA) brings together the global eyes customs through its programs and initiatives. Since 1916 OSA has worked to advance the mutual interests of the field, providing educational resource to the scientists, engineers and business concern leaders who work in the field past promoting the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics. OSA publications, events, technical groups and programs foster optics cognition and scientific collaboration among all those with an interest in optics and photonics. For more than information, visit world wide web.osa.org.
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