Eye on the road to better optics

Many people suffer from reduced clarity of vision that does not make them anywhere blind, but makes it hard to read road signs, for example. In 36 states of the USA, people are allowed to drive cars using ‘bioptics’: mini telescopes that hang just in front of one of the spectacle lens, which can be glanced into to read something detailed. Yet they are so ugly that many people won’t wear them. More worryingly, when used to look at a magnified image, the rest of the field of view in its vicinity is obscured. However, Dr Eli Peli and Dr Fernando Vargas-Martin, working together in the Schepens Eye Research Institute in the Harvard Medical School, have now come up with a solution. This is a combination of ideas, based on astronomical telescopes and periscopes, that embeds an optical path on its side within the thickness of a spectacle lens, so that light coming through that lens in the normal manner is not interfered with.