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As a boy my walls were covered in pictures of airplanes. Some were real and some were from TV programs, but they were cool and I wanted to be sat in them, looping loops, rolling rolls, and zooming though clouds. The first company I worked for would pay its engineers to obtain a private pilots license. Not quite the adrenaline filled visions I had as a child, but better than nothing. But I never took up the offer, something held me back, and that something was my eyesight. In short, it’s crap. I have an astigmatism, I’m 10 diopter in both eyes, and I’m color blind.ย Worst of all, I don’t see a stereoscopic image.

This means when I look at (say) the white lines on the freeway, I see two sets and they point in different directions. The car in front? Yep, there are two of them as well. If I concentrate and blink frequently my right eye becomes dominant for a moment and I see one image, but when I’m tired at the end of the day, I have to close my left eye. If I drive long distances I usually stop after an hour’s driving to rest.

The same happens when I look at people. They merge and separate depending on how hard I concentrate. Keeping one image is hard work. When I talk to people I don’t bother focusing on them because it’s too much effort. Usually by mid-morning I have a dull ache in my head.

But this week’s been different, because on Monday I picked up a new pair of eyeglasses. Nothing special there, but these glasses have a prism in them.

It’s not the triangular cheese wedge you used in physics, the prism effect is created by canting the optical plane of the lenses to make both of my eyes stare at the same point.

And the effect is amazing.

This week I haven’t seen a single “double image,” the dull headaches have gone, and I’ve spent the whole week grinning. I can turn my head around and not have to work out which of the two things I see are real. When I look at the TV I don’t have to close one eye.

I’m not one for going overboard but

๐Ÿ˜€ ๐Ÿ˜€ It’s awesome!!!!!!! ๐Ÿ˜€ ๐Ÿ˜€

and if I knew how to make that font flash, I would do.

Hopefully you don’t have a similar problem, but if you do, talk to your optician about prisms. When they do that test where they want you to tell them when the images overlap, don’t take the answer I heard for years that “you’re not look at the image properly,” because you are, and there is something they can do.

And the effect really is awesome.

Cheers!

 

(Gratuitous images courtesy of Wikipedia, Retro.net and Pittsburghmagazine.com)

 

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