Cataract is the world’s most common cause of preventable blindness and is alone responsible for the complete loss of vision of 50 million people. Cataracts are caused by clouding the eye lens or higher-order aberrations at the eye lens. The WHO estimates that by 2020, 32 million cataract operations/year are performed, up from 12 million in 2000. Surgery to
replace the eye lens with an artificial intraocular lens (IOL) is the only option. However, how the patient will see after surgery cannot be known. What is needed is an accurate and reliable tool to simulate the corrected visual acuity before the patient goes through surgery.
We propose a holographic vision simulator for patients that discriminate the effects of cataracts and provide a clear simulation of the postoperative visual acuity. Computer-generated holography (CGH) is the only technology that can control the light beam’s phase, size, and shape entering the eye pupil. CGH displays offer unprecedented flexibility in presenting different viewing conditions for diagnostics and simulation of various visual disorders. We developed a near-eye CGH display using an integrated pupil tracker to automatically register and align the patient’s pupil with the exit pupil of the display.