Optics has always been a source of innovation in vision research, in part by providing technology that has advanced our understanding of the visual system. In addition, because the eye’s optics set the first limit on visual performance, ocular optics has traditionally been a focus in vision research. Recently, the introduction of new optical technologies such as wavefront sensing and adaptive optics has caused a renaissance in visual optics. These technologies are opening doors to research topics that were previously inaccessible.
By using wavefront sensing, we may now understand better the nature and location of the aberrations within the eye, the optical properties of the crystalline lens, and its changes with accommodation or aging. These new experimental data will play a fundamental role in the development of more elaborate models of the ocular optics that will ultimately improve vision correction.
Adaptive optics — the correction or manipulation of the eye’s aberrations — is central to new instruments for imaging the retina, and is critical to experiments that further explore both optical and neural mechanisms in vision.
We believe that these optical technologies will appear in a plethora of practical applications in vision science and ophthalmology. New customized lenses or the prediction of visual quality using optical data and neural modeling are only some obvious examples.
The papers in this special issue of the Journal of Vision capture the usefulness of this new optical technology in vision research. We hope that this issue will be of use to both optics and vision scientists who are eager to apply these new technologies in their research.