The body of Ophiocoma wendtii, a type of brittle star, is covered with ommatidia, turning its whole skin into a compound eye. The same is true of many chitons. The tube feet of sea urchins contain photoreceptor proteins, which together act as a compound eye; they lack screening pigments, but can detect the directionality of light by the shadow cast by its opaque body. Nutrients
The ciliary body is triangular in horizontal section and is coated by a double layer, the ciliary epithelium. The inner layer is transparent and covers the vitreous body, and is continuous from the neural tissue of the retina. The outer layer is highly pigmented, continuous with the retinal pigment epithelium, and constitutes the cells of the dilator muscle. The vitreous is the transparent, colourless, gelatinous mass that fills the space between the lens of the eye and the retina lining the back of the eye. It is produced by certain retinal cells. It is of rather similar composition to the cornea, but contains very few cells (mostly phagocytes which remove unwanted cellular debris in the visual field, as well as the hyalocytes of Balazs of the surface of the vitreous, which reprocess the hyaluronic acid), no blood vessels, and 98–99% of its volume is water (as opposed to 75% in the cornea) with salts, sugars, vitrosin (a type of collagen), a network of collagen type II fibres with the mucopolysaccharide hyaluronic acid, and also a wide array of proteins in micro amounts.
The most basic form, seen in some gastropods and annelids, consists of a lens of one refractive index. A far sharper image can be obtained using materials with a high refractive index, decreasing to the edges; this decreases the focal length and thus allows a sharp image to form on the retina. This also allows a larger aperture for a given sharpness of image, allowing more light to enter the lens; and a flatter lens, reducing spherical aberration. Such a non-homogeneous lens is necessary for the focal length to drop from about 4 times the lens radius, to 2.5 radii.Heterogeneous eyes have evolved at least nine times: four or more times in gastropods, once in the copepods, once in the annelids, once in the cephalopods, and once in the chitons, which have aragonite lenses. No extant aquatic organisms possess homogeneous lenses; presumably the evolutionary pressure for a heterogeneous lens is great enough for this stage to be quickly "outgrown".This eye creates an image that is sharp enough that motion of the eye can cause significant blurring. To minimise the effect of eye motion while the animal moves, most such eyes have stabilising eye muscles.The ocelli of insects bear a simple lens, but their focal point usually lies behind the retina; consequently, those cant form a sharp image.