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Welcome to the Customized Vision Correction Laboratory website. Our laboratory is one of many research laboratories at the University of Rochester Eye Institute, Center for Visual Science, Institute of Optics and Biomedical Engineering working to better understand optics of the eye and to improve human vision.

The human eye is a relatively simple optical system. Despite this, the eye is not perfect. It suffers from aberrations, which are small deformations or abnormalities that blur the retinal image. Some of these aberrations, like defocus (sphere) and astigmatism (cylinder) can be corrected using conventional correction methods like glasses, contact lenses, and refractive surgery. However, there are a number of higher-order aberrations, such as coma and spherical aberration, that also play a part in image formation. Although they do not normally degrade our vision as much as the lower-order ones, correcting these aberrations can still improve our visual performance. This improvement can be even more significant especially, when the eye's pupil gets bigger for example during night time driving. More importantly, people with ocular pathologies like keratoconus or those that have had corneal transplants may benefit substantially even during the day. With robust diagnostic tools and customized correction methods we have been developing, the 20/20 standard that has been accepted as normal may, one day, be a thing of the past.