An Eyeglass Simulator Using Conoid Tracing

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for displaying images at the fovea of the retina taking visual acuity into account. Previous research has shown that a point light source projected onto the retina forms an ellipse, which can be computed with wavefront tracing from each point in space. We propose a novel concept using conoid tracing, with which we can acquire defocusing information several times faster than that acquired by previous methods. We also show that conoid tracing is more robust and produces higher quality results. In conoid tracing the ray is regarded as a conoid, a thin cone-like shape with varying elliptical cross-section. The viewing ray from the retina is traced as a conoid and evaluated at each sample location. Using the sampled and pre-computed data for the spatial distribution of blurring, we implemented an interactive eyeglass simulator. This paper demonstrates some visualization results utilizing the interactivity of the simulator, which an eyeglass lens design company uses to evaluate the design of complex progressive lenses.