Aniseikonia
Visual comfort dictated by your lens. How your lenses are made matters.
Clear vision, but not comfortable.
The goal of your eyeglass prescription is to focus light entering the eye into a clear image. Traditionally, eyeglasses are made thinking about one eye at a time. If your eyeglasses can make your right eye vision clear, and your left eye vision clear, then your vision should be clear and comfortable. However, this is not always the case! Your two eyes need to work as a team.
Eyeglass lenses have side effects when manipulating light into a clear image, such as magnifying or minifying the incoming light.
If your eyeglass prescription is different between your two eyes, your eyeglass lenses may manipulate image size differently. At a certain point of difference between your two eyes, it becomes difficult and/or uncomfortable for the brain merge these images when interpreting information from your two eyes.
The greater the difference in prescription between your two eyes, the greater the difference in image size between your eyes. This image size difference, known as aniseikonia, can cause a number of symptoms.
When light passes through transparent material, like a glass of water or the lens of your eyeglasses, the path of the light is altered. This can cause distortion of the incoming image, as seen in this picture.
What is Aniseikonia?
Aniseikonia is the difference in image size perceived between the eyes from unequal magnification.
This difference in image sizes can create a number of symptoms.
The Solution: The Aniseikonia Lens
The Aniseikonia lens is a highly specialized eyeglass lens designed to manage image size difference between your two eyes. Through high level optics, the Aniseikonia lens manipulates various lens features (such as lens material, thickness or curvature) to create balanced visual input for each of your two eyes.
This allows your two eyes to work together as a team, providing equally clear and equally sized visual information to the brain. The end result: clear, comfortable vision.
Traditional eyeglass lenses.
Aniseikonia eyeglass lenses.
The videos above compare traditional eyeglass lenses to the Aniseikonia lens. Both videos feature two lenses that are different enough in eyeglass prescription to induce aniseikonia and the symptoms that come with it.
In the video on the left, we see how traditional eyeglass lenses impact image size. Note the significant magnification and minification effect of each lens.
In the video on the right, we see how Aniseikonia lenses manage image size. What a difference from traditional eyeglass lenses!
Aniseikonia is complicated! If you have any questions, or think you may be affected by aniseikonia, please give us a call at 718-273-5000 or visit us at 1884 Victory Blvd, Staten Island NY.
