There’s a reason so many ’70s kids ran around with a Steve Austin doll glued to one eye.* The emphasis in this story is on the benefits for the blind, but the implications of “cracking the code” the brain uses to interpret images from the retina are far greater, of course.
Versatile vision is fun. My vision, uncorrected, is so bad that one of my eyes actually magnifies images. It’s a fun parlor trick, but it’s actually turning out to be useful to be so nearsighted as I’ve aged. Aging sucks if you like to read, kids, because, you progressively lose the ability to focus on things within reach of your arms. And as much as I read, if I get tired of holding the book/Kindle waaaaaaay out there, with my natural nearsightedness I can just pop off the glasses or contacts and voila! I can hold the book as little as an inch away from my face if I want and still focus like a champ.
Versatile vision, even as annoying as mine, is fun enough that I can guarantee there’s going to be a market for modular eyes — one set for near, one for far, one for night vision, one for stargazing — you get the idea.
*Our parents wouldn’t buy us binoculars?
No reason why a good set of ocular implants couldn’t function in various modes… would make more sense than popping them in and out, losing, dropping, etc.
I had LASIK surgery about seven weeks ago to correct my severe myopia and astigmatism. I now have the vision of a perfectly sighted 50 year-old man.
Which means the front sight on a handgun is now a blur without reading glasses.
Dammit.
Like you, I USED to be able to take my glasses off and focus on something about 6″ in front of my eyeball and closer. This was actually a useful thing. Now to see anything up that close, my reading glasses have to be +2 diopter. Computer work requires +1.5. Progressive reading glasses (0-2 diopter) aren’t working. It’s like looking through a funhouse mirror.
I’m not sorry I had the surgery – it’s great to be able to see at a distance, to wear regular sunglasses and safety glasses, to see the time on the clock at the foot of the bed in the morning without having to find my glasses first, but I didn’t expect my presbyopia (inability to focus up close) to be THAT bad.
Getting old sucks, but I understand it’s better than the alternative.
Now I need to find some +0.5 diopter shooting glasses….
Gathering and transmitting enough of the readily available light to offer a sufficiently bright and sharp image define the brightness of a pair of binoculars. Brightness is certainly 1 factor to contemplate when determining the most effective pair of binoculars for you, but is not normally the most important. After all, most of your bird watching likely is going to be during well lit conditions when birds are active.