Creating correct aberrations: why blur isn’t always bad in the eye

Abstract

In optics in general, a sharp aberration-free image is normally the desired goal, and the whole field of adaptive optics has developed with the aim of producing blur-free images. Likewise, in ophthalmic optics we normally aim for a sharp image on the retina. But even with an emmetropic, or well-corrected eye, chromatic and high order aberrations affect the image. We describe two different areas where it is important to take these effects into account and why creating blur correctly via rendering can be advantageous. Firstly we show how rendering chromatic aberration correctly can drive accommodation in the eye and secondly report on matching defocus-l generated using rendering with conventional optical defocus