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From: wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin )
Newsgroups: net.med
Subject: Re: Reading in bad light
Message-ID: <536@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 8-Aug-85 16:33:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.536
Posted: Thu Aug  8 16:33:47 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Aug-85 19:42:30 EDT
References: <1528@trwrba.UUCP> <190@ski.UUCP>
Reply-To: wmartin@brl-bmd.UUCP
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Organization: USAMC ALMSA, St. Louis, MO
Lines: 26

Hmm, so when you hold the page far enough away to let your eyes focus at
their normal, unstrained distance, you don't have enough light coming
from the page to your eye to distinguish the characters, so you bring it
closer to make them out, and this strains your eyes.

I have just the opposite problem -- in one eye (my right, measured as
20/500 uncorrected), I have clear vision about four inches away from the
eye, with a depth of field about 1 1/2 inches. I can read characters or
words easily enough with that, but, if I hold a page of text at that
distance, the field of view of that eye is far too narrow -- I cannot
see enough of the page to read wuth my normal rapid scanning which gives
me a good fast reading speed. I would have to move the paper through the
eye's field of view, which can't be done steadily for long. 

An interesting idea for getting some use out of this eye would be to
mount some sort of high-contrast small display (that would present a
word or phrase of text) in a headset which would hold it in that limited
field of vision for that eye, and use tachistoscope techniques to flash
the words by at high reading speed. Hmm.. netnews at 1000 wpm while
lying in bed... (And, if I could switch off my corpus callosum, I could
have a different one for each eye, showing different stuff... Which eye
should get the technical groups and which the artistic & frivolous?)

Science marches on...

Regards, Will