Accurately assessing the visual acuity of an individual is important for a number of purposes. Of course, an accurate assessment of the visual acuity of a subject is a prerequisite to successfully prescribing corrective eyewear for an individual. Additionally, however, assessing the visual abilities of an individual accurately may be critical to determining a training regiment for an individual to improve the visual abilities of the individual, vision testing may even be important to determine what activities an individual should be allowed to engage in, for example, to determine whether an individual may work as a commercial airplane pilot.
Often, visual acuity is assessed using eye charts or eye chart like arrangements. For example, the individual whose visual acuity is being tested may be instructed to read letters or other visual indicia off of a chart located at a predetermined distance from the individual having indicia of varying sizes to determine the smallest size indicia the individual may correctly perceive at a given distance. While such an arrangement has served the eye care industry well, some circumstances do not permit the ready use of such an arrangement. For example, physical space is required to place a subject at a sufficient distance from an eye chart. Moreover, the use of an eye chart using language based indicia, such as letters of an alphabet, can make assessing the visual abilities of illiterate individuals or non-native speakers difficult or impossible. Also, the crowding of multiple indicia on a single chart can cause difficulties unrelated to basic static visual acuity for individuals with unsteady fixation. Further, a typical eye chart arrangement tests only the static visual acuity of an individual, in that the indicia presented are stationary relative to the subject. In real life situations, such as driving or participating in athletic activities, dynamic visual acuity, where an object or indicia is moving relative to the subject, becomes critical to the effective performance of the individual. However, a traditional eye chart assessment does not measure the dynamic visual acuity of a subject.
Beyond visual testing, visual training, while known to be useful in some applications, has similarly been difficult to implement effectively and efficiently. Often, vision testing and vision training may use similar or even identical equipment and/or methods.