The optics of the human eye at 8.6 µm resolution.

Ocular optics is normally estimated based on up to 2,600 measurement points within the pupil of the eye, which implies a lateral resolution of approximately 175 µm for a 9 mm pupil diameter. This is because information below this resolution is not thought to be relevant or even possible to obtain with current measurement systems. In this work, we characterize the in vivo ocular optics of the human eye with a lateral resolution of 8.6 µm, which implies roughly 1 million measurement points for a pupil diameter of 9 mm. The results suggest that the normal human eye presents a series of hitherto unknown optical patterns with amplitudes between 200 and 300 nm and is made up of a series of in-phase peaks and valleys. If the results are analysed at only high lateral frequencies, the human eye is also found to contain a whole range of new information. This discovery could have a great impact on the way we understand some fundamental mechanisms of human vision and could be of outstanding utility in certain fields of ophthalmology.

Atmospheric wavefront phase recovery by use of specialized hardware: graphical processing units and field-programmable gate arrays.

To achieve the wavefront phase-recovery stage of an adaptive-optics loop computed in real time for 32 x 32 or a greater number of subpupils in a Shack-Hartmann sensor, we present here, for what is to our knowledge the first time, preliminary results that we obtained by using innovative techniques: graphical processing units (GPUs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). We describe the stream-computing paradigm of the GPU and adapt a zonal algorithm to take advantage of the parallel computational power of the GPU. We also present preliminary results we obtained by use of FPGAs on the same algorithm. GPUs have proved to be a promising technique, but FPGAs are already a feasible solution to adaptive-optics real-time requirements, even for a large number of subpupils.