Wired News delivered to your inbox or hand-held device. If you were standing across the room from your cat you could count every hair on his coat. This is like taking that clarity up to the next level. The optical system, known as Super Vision or Perfect Vision, is still in the research stage but at least one major eye-care company is focusing on its possibilities. The Super Vision system uses techniques originally developed by astronomers to sharpen telescope images distorted by Earth's atmosphere.
Researchers direct a highly focused beam of light into the eyes of subjects.
Light that reflects back out of the eye passes through an array of micro-lenses that break up the light into an array of 217 separate beams. That array falls onto, and is photographed by, a sensitive digital camera. If the subject has perfect vision, the photographed array reveals a perfect pattern. But since no cornea is perfectly shaped, the photographed array instead gives researchers a distinct, personalized, and very detailed, look at the most minute corneal and lens defects, all revealed by the refracted light beam. The system detects visual distortions so subtle that until now they've never been measured.