Laser eye treatment is two decades old, and adept surgeons have gone far beyond giving patients 20:20 vision. Times Online has profiled several such doctors, who offer to tailor their clients' eyesight to their occupation.

Julian Stevens, who practices at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, has given special forces members and fighter pilots the aforementioned ability to see a thousand meters in the dark, and he notes that taxi drivers could benefit from a similar procedure. Stephen Trokel, who helped pioneer laser eye surgery, operated on a soprano who wanted to be able to read the music in the front row of the orchestra, as well as a New York Yankees catcher who needed to be able to see the ball coming out of the light. Another group that favors the occupational ocular enhancements? US presidential candidates, several of whom have received "monovision," which allows them to easily read with one eye and see far away with the other. This combination eliminates the need for reading glasses or bifocals, and some politicians hope it creates a sense of youthfulness.

What do we have to thank for this custom technology? The space program. Wavefront technology, which was developed by NASA to improve the focus of the Hubble Space Telescope, has translated neatly to the human eye. The technology allows physicians to map the cornea and iris, enabling surgeons to make small, specific tweaks to the eye that result in custom eyesight made to order.

Surgeons offer eyesight tailored to an individual's life and career [Times Online via Reddit]

Researchers at the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at Children's Hospital Boston saw the need for a new way of getting eye medications delivered. They found that, using traditional eye drops, less than ten percent of the medication stays in the eye; blinking and tears wash out the rest.

The solution that this team developed is a multi-layer contact lens, with a biodegradable medium containing the drug inside of it. The contact lenses can slowly release the drug into the eye.

I'm already getting a weird feeling, talking about biodegradable polymers in my eye. But all of the materials used in these contacts are FDA-approved already, and the lab is already testing on animals, moving on to human testing as soon as possible. It's probably better than multiple-times-a-day eye drops, but you still have to get this thing into your eye...

A drug-dispensing contact lens [via Science Blog]

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and California Institute of Technology have studied the advantages of various placements of two eyes on an animal’s body, which can go beyond mere depth perception:

Most animals—fish, insects, reptiles, birds, rabbits, and horses, for example—live in non-cluttered environments like fields or plains and have eyes located on either side of their head. These sideways-facing eyes give an animal panoramic vision—the ability to see in front and behind itself.

Humans, primates, and other large mammals like tigers, however, have eyes pointing in the same direction. These animals evolved in cluttered environments, such as forests or jungles. Because of their forward-facing eyes, these animals lose the ability to see behind themselves, but they gain a type of X-ray vision that maximizes their ability to see in leafy environments.

Those two eyes focus on slightly different points, allowing us to visualize the area behind some objects:

Demonstrating this X-ray ability is fairly simple: hold a pen vertically and look at something far beyond it. If you first close one eye, and then the other, you'll see that in each case the pen blocks your view. If you open both eyes, however, you can see through the pen to the world behind it.

Unfortunately, although this ability benefited our tree-dwelling ancestors, cognitive science professor Mark Changizi notes that it is less useful to us in our modern life:

"In today's world, humans have more in common visually with tiny mice in a forest than with a large animal in the jungle. We aren't faced with a great deal of small clutter, and the things that do clutter our visual field, like cars and skyscrapers, are much wider than the separation between our eyes, so we can't use our X-ray power to see through them. If we froze ourselves today and woke up a million years from now, it might be difficult for us to look the new human population in the eye, because by then their eyes might be facing sideways."

Scientists Find Our Eyes Evolved for 'X-Ray' Vision [via Science Blog]

It's no secret that Superman was so overpowered in the comic books that he used to move planets around, was extremely super-smart, traveled through time (without flying around the Earth backwards) on a regular basis, and had powers ranging from super-smell to super-mimicry. He outmatched nearly everyone in the universe, except God, so they had to retcon his ass a few times.

Chief among Superman's powers was his vision, which started out of just the ability to see things fairly sharply, but over the years he must have had laser-eye surgery, because things got a whole lot better for him:

• Probably the most-wanted usage of Supey's eyes was his 'x-ray' vision. What teenage boy (and possibly some girls) wouldn't have wanted to see through clothes? You could even order x-ray spex (that sadly did not work) from the back of comic books. He couldn't see through lead, and according to Kingdom Come he couldn't give you cancer either. No 'melanoma vision' for our hero.
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• His 'heat vision' (which was originally a by-product of the x-ray vision) is portrayed as either lasers shooting from his eyes, fiery optic blasts, or the literal balls of fire which they seem fond of on Smallville. The comics later explain that he's able to shoot his stored-up solar energy out through his eyes.
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• His 'telescopic vision' grew over the comics to eventually let him see not just distant planets, but what was happening on those planets. We wonder if he could flip that vision around so things just appeared very, very tiny.
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• Superman used his 'microscopic vision' on many occasions in the 1970s, analyzing fingerprints, checking out atomic structures, electrons, and protons. In fact, he could have made a fortune alone just by checking houses for fleas.
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• Superman could also see into the electromagnetic spectrum, which allowed him to do dorky things like follow broadcast signals back to their origins. You know, for when crooks go on TV to brag about their plans.
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• Supey also sported 'radar vision,' which was apparently just low-powered infravision, allowing him to see in the dark.
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• He could also combine these vision powers, like using x-ray vision and telescopic vision at the same time, so he could see those distant planets without an asteroid blocking his view.
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• Ultra Boy from The Legion of Super-Heroes had abilities similar to Superman's, although his 'penetra-vision' could see through everything, including lead, and his 'flash-vision' burns twice as hot as Superman's heat vision. Oh, and it's blue.
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• Speaking of blue vision, Superman developed a new 'electrical vision' power in Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman as an homage to the electric blue Superman from the 90s. Why you'd want to send a shout-out to that particular version of Superman, we'll never know.
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• When Superman "died" and his "Superboy" clone appeared, he didn't have any vision powers. However, he later was given a pair of goggles that simulated most of Superman's vision abilities. Why doesn't Superman just give a pair of those to every cop on the planet?

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• Geordi LaForge's visor: When Star Trek launched The Next Generation in XXX, one of the most striking visuals was Levar Burton wearing what looked like a car air filter over his eyes. The visor allowed his character, who was born blind, to see in the infrared spectrum, at the microscopic level, and to detect energy levels. He could even detect vital signs and tell if someone was lying, making him handy to have around. However, he must have been happy when the First Contact film came around, because he didn't have to wear that wacky visor anymore.
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• Predator-Vision: In the Predator films, the titular aliens have evolved to the point where they have developed their own infrared vision. However, they've invented helmets with enhancements that take the vision even further, letting them see with X-Ray vision, to detect radioactive sources, auto-target, and even (in the Aliens Vs. Predator films) to see with sort kind of electro-magnetic vision that allows them to track Aliens, who don't show up on infrared scanners. While those helmets looked sleek and cool with awesome functions, they still resembled fugly crab-aliens underneath.
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• Luke Skywalker's binoculars: When Luke was trapped on Tatooine as a teenager, he had loads of time to daydream and imagine what life was like on other worlds. So he'd frequently scan the sky and the horizon with his binoculars, hoping to find some sort of excitement. Plus, they came in handy when R2D2 and C3P0 went missing. No idea what all the different numbers and gauges mean, besides distance (maybe Luke had ganked his Uncle's golf binocs) but the view through them was 1977 gee-whiz tech.
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• Cyclop's visor from The X-Men: This special visor which was outfitted with ruby quartz lenses that have the ability to block his optic blasts. So, it might not allow him to see things closer or at the molecular level, but it does keep him from blowing the hell out of everyone and everything he looks at. If you ask us, that's not a bad enhancement. Later he was able to sport some ruby quartz sunglasses, although that sort of makes his "Cyclops" name a bit useless.
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• The glasses in William Gibson's Virtual Light: In this novel, the characters are trying to track down a pair of glasses that you can't see through. Instead, they use EMP drivers to send signals directly to your optic nerve. As a result, they allow you to see without having photos hit your retinas, and they can also pump more information into the signal. For instance, one of the characters describes that the glasses cost about the same as a "small Japanese car", and that when you look at things through them, "Put 'em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there's this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that." One pair to go, please.
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• Nanotech eyes in Deus Ex: In Warren Spector's dystopian future video game, you play a "nanotech operative" who has the ability to upgrade and enhance his body in the field, which you'll have to do in order to complete the game. One of the coolest modifications was upgrading your eyes so you could see in the dark and through walls. This usually comes in handy when people are trying to kill you, as you can imagine.
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• The HUD in Down and Out in the Magic Kindom: In Cory Doctorow's future, people live with onboard computers in their brains that allow them to make phone calls, record their daily lives through sight and sound, and provide heads-up displays in their eyes where they can check the time, read files, surf the web, and check other people's "whuffie" scores. Whuffie basically tells you "how cool is this person?" and becomes the currency of the day. As interesting as that is, we're most exciting by surfing the net on our eyeballs.
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• The sunglasses in They Live: In John Carpenter's "I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum" humans vs. aliens film, former pro wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper finds a pair of very special sunglasses. They let him see the world as it actually is with fugly aliens controlling the human race, subliminal messages they keep them sedate and to "Obey." Of course, Roddy isn't too happy with this, and goes on a killing spree.
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• The Bionic Eye: In both the Six Million Dollar Man and the newly rebooted The Bionic Woman (sorry old Bionic woman, you got stuck with a Bionic ear), the main characters are both outfitted with bionic eyes that give them the ability to zoom in on subjects and see into the infrared. Not one was this one of the coolest Bionic upgrades in my opinion, but it also made for the best action figure I ever lost. Colonel Steve Austin's action figure had a big hole in his head that you could look through to "simulate" bionic vision. My parents probably thought I'd glued that thing to my head. Bionic eyes or bionic contact lenses, let's hope you get here soon.
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