Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.

Super Vision Sans Bionics

PixelOptics of Roanoke, Virginia, just won a $3.5 million Department of Defense grant to refine its "supervision" technology, which Blum claims could double the quality of a person's eyesight. "Theoretically, this should be able to double the distance that a person can see clearly," he says.

At the heart of PixelOptics' technology are tiny, electronically-controlled pixels embedded within a traditional eyeglass lens. Technicians scan the eyeball with an aberrometer -- a device that measures aberrations that can impede vision -- and then the pixels are programmed to correct the irregularities.

Traditional glasses correct lower-order aberrations like nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatisms. PixelOptics' lenses handle higher-order aberrations that are much more difficult to detect and correct.

Thanks to technologies created for astronomical telescopes and spy satellites, aberrometers can map a person's eye with extreme accuracy. Lasers bounce off the back of the eyeball, and structures in the eye scatter the resulting beam of light.

Software reads the scattered beam and creates a map of the patient's eye, including tiny abnormalities such as bumps, growths and valleys. The pixelated eyeglass lens is then tuned to refract light in a way that corrects for those high-level aberrations.

Blum hopes to have a working prototype within a year that is built to military specifications.
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Blum agrees that improving upon 20/20 vision isn't an end in itself. But people likely can't conceive of the results they might get with his company's technology. For example, slight changes in lighting and air pressure can trigger pixels to reprogram, powered by a computer built into the spectacle frames.

"Most higher-order abnormalities impact vision only under certain conditions," he says. "We can adjust dynamically to those conditions, which makes a big difference in your ability to see."