Different points of view...

[magid]

I've had vague ideas for a project showing how different people (and animals, but that's a whole 'nother vector) see things, in the physical sense, myopia and presbyopia, astigmatism, different kinds of colorblindness, limited fields of vision or blank spots, and so on. (And if it included animals, there could be faceted eyes, and dim vision augmented by smells, and even more complicated things.)

Which is probably too much to do without a science museum exhibit.

But an installation could work to show myopia and presbyopia.

There could be some pieces of 3D art in the middle of a circle, something with noticeable detail on it, circled by something looking like pairs of binoculars (either hanging from sticks by a chain, or fixed at one height with a step or two available to let people of different heights look more easily. Instead of binoculars, they'd have lenses fitted so there'd be different views of the middle piece. The first would be 20/20, then moving out from that, near to one side, far to the other, by 20s out to 100, then by 50s or 100s, to 1000, which would be next to one another. Someone with perfect vision (or corrected to 20/20) could see how things would look if there weren't correction.

I'd share my first in the morning/last at night blurry world.

Of course, I have practically no idea of how to implement this, even just getting lenses ground to the correct curve, even without figuring out a reasonable piece for the middle.

Comments

[cnoocy]

The lenses might be standard pieces for optician's supply companies. It's worth checking, anyway.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I'd assumed (based on nothing at all, of course) that the curvature needed to correct someone's 20/400 vision would not be the same as the curvature needed to make someone's 20/20 vision into 20/400, which led me to the conclusion that regular optical places wouldn't have these.

I hadn't thought about the equipment the opticians use ("better this way or this way? this way or this way?"). I should see if there's some kind of aftermarket for outdated versions of those machines. This could get spendy real fast...

[cnoocy]

This could get spendy real fast...

Step 1 is figuring out how to do it. Step 2 is how to do it cheaply. (I imagine broken ones would be cheaper than retired ones, for example.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

*nod* about broken ones. I don't picture these showing up at junkyards, though... I should ask my optometrist for suggestions.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

ebay, craigslist . . . there might even be specialized online auction/sales places for second-hand optics.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Good thoughts.

I think I need to talk to an optometrist or someone like that so I'd know what to get.

[dancingdeer.livejournal.com]

This isn't *quite* what you're talking about, but it's interesting, even if it's very limited in terms of prescription strength - it goes absolutely nowhere near mine, for example. http://www.billauer.co.il/simulator.html

[magid.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I hear you about not going far enough; I'm one of the more myopic people I know.

I'm less interested in how those letter charts look, because it doesn't give the feel of being in the environment the way looking at some interesting thing would (which in turn is much less than having an environment to navigate, but still a better approximation).

[queue.livejournal.com]

You might be interested to see this, simulating how a child sees the world:

http://tinyeyes.com/tinyeyes/

And also this, which simulates colorblind vision:

http://vischeck.com/

(both references from the perception chapter of our forthcoming book on color imaging)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Ooh, interesting!

It looks like babies are effectively nearsighted and also see colors differently (I keep thinking it looks like washed-photos from the 70s in the second-to-last photo). It implies to me that for the first month or so, babies are designed to sleep/eat/adjust to being out more than interact with the rest of the world.

And the color-blindness stuff is interesting. I didn't know that there are different kinds of red/green color blindness. (I've got my new words for today: deuteranopia, tritanopia, protanopia [spell check doesn't like any of these, btw, and suggests changing the first to Deuteronomy :-)]) And red-green colorblind people live in a world with lots of muddy brownish colors. I have to admit, I'm glad I don't.

(Reminds me of an sf story about kids on a new planet doing art. The parents are nostalgic for the light of Earth, and keep one space with that light, unlike that planet's natural light, which looks wrong. One of the kids keeps drawing some awful pictures, which turn out to be wonderful when seen in the planet's light, and in the story it was realized that the kid saw things differently (in a good way), that he'd adjusted to the planet retinally somehow.)

[queue.livejournal.com]

You know, the vischeck thing could be really useful for people designing board/card games. Mock up your artwork, then just run it through the program to see what becomes hard to distinguish with different types of colorblindness.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Definitely.

I'm working on some to-be-online pieces just now, and having red and green things in the same piece have already been nixed. Hadn't talked about blue/yellow, though.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I wish some of my classmates would do that! Seriously, I've seen people put together presentations where they used red to highlight certain things, and green to highlight others. Um, no, that is NOT going to work for every potential person in your audience!

[cellio]

That would be nifty!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Let's see if I actually make it happen...
:-)