My vision is also slightly defective. And sometimes darned peculiar. I am right handed, but my left eye produced higher cognition.
I was reading a sign one day while lamenting the fact that my astigmatism fell between two standard corrections so neither setting was satisfactory. (this is another rant - see bottom)
While I was comparing one eye to the other I realized that with my left eye I could read the line I was focused on, but I could also read the text of the lines 2 above and 2 below it and also several words at a time left/right of it. With my right eye (the supposed good one with less correction) I could only read the exact line I was looking at and only those words adjacent to where I was focused.
I spent about half an hour looking and pondering and covering one eye and then the other - at the end I could actually feel the back of my head straining at the effort to turn that stream of neural input into language.
That is when I really started looking not just at the vision aspect of things, but also in the processing that takes place after the actual "seeing" is over with.
I think there are huge opportunities for atypical applications. Sort of a "what if" type scenario.
Imagine if you had a wearable sonar device like the old camera range finders hooked to something that gave input to an area of the visual cortex. Would you be able to know distance exactly?
How about if you added a data stream from a CCD that saw in some other spectrum - could you watch a radio tower broadcast songs? If you cross linked this to a hearing center and created an artificial
synesthasia would you be able to tell what song was playing by looking at the tower? And how do you do this kind of test on a rabbit or a chimp?
And that is why I had all those links. Oh did I mention I get loqacious too?
I used to work at Coburn Optical Industries. I wrote the user interface for the equipment that makes you glasses in an hour at the mall. In fact it makes them in about 5 minutes. We had one guy (responsible for translating those few digits the doc writes out into a set of CNC instructions for the lens lathe. A really sharp guy!) that had figured how to make progressive lenses out of ANY blank.
Side note here on how glasses are made.
1. You had your 'script to the lackey behind the counter and he walks behind the curtain.
2. A hockey puck shaped blank gets attached to a clip using liquid metal (a really nasty cocktail of 5 or 6 heavy metals that melt at about 115 F). The "front" of this blank is protected by a piece of thick plastic and already has a specified curvature on it.
3. Cool equipment (that can't even be screwed up by some high schooler on his summer break - yes that was a requirement) carves the inside curve into the back of the lens combining the spherical and cylindrical corrections as directed by the 'script. The blank exits this process with a roughness of 20 microns on the surface
4. Next piece of equipment polishes the inside curve to a really nice shine using some tools that look like the belong on the floor of a shower. (I'll see if I can find pics later)
5. Last piece of equipment carves the shape of the frames onto the now very thin lens.
6. Dip it in hot water to melt the metal, detach the protective plastic form the front. Stick it in the frame and stick them on your face.
5 minutes from beginning to end per lens and yes, you can run the process in parallel once the first lens is off the first machine.
Anyway, the patent for the no line bifocals requires that you buy the special blanks from the patent holder and if you do not have the blank in stock that has the right set of curves on the front you have to order it and that hour turns into a week or more.
Our technology would take the ordinary (and MUCH MUCH less expensive) blanks and carve the combination of curves in the back of the blank. You get exactly the same optical results. But because of the patent law in this country, customers are changed whopping large amounts for fewer features. Oh and did I mention this technology is from 1993?
But the real crime is that 'scripts are only written in 0.25 diopter increments because the very old equipment could not make an arbitrary cut.
But Coburn's could.
If your astigmatism was of a non-standard strength and in a non-standard angle, their equipment could make the exact lens you needed.
My "perfect" glasses are now at the bottom of lake because they fell off while I was on a jet ski. I had them for 5 years (and really by then, my eyes were no longer the same, but heck, they were custom made lenses!!)
People tend to look at you a little strangely when they know you stuff voodoo dolls full of Ex-Lax.