I just got back from a live music event at a small theater. I'd forgotten to bring my glasses with me.
I'm near-sighted, (that is, objects up close are in sharp focus, but things far away get fuzzy. I can't drive safely without glasses because road signs are unreadable.)
Normally, I don't pay much attention to the fuzziness of things. I just live with it. (I tend not to bother with glasses). But as I found myself staring at people on stage for prolonged periods, (lots of sitting with guitars on stools), I remembered an odd question which I'd never yet solved to my satisfaction.
People were fuzzy, yes, but it's an odd kind of fuzzy.
When I pay close attention to a blurred visual, such as when I look at the title of a book from across a room, I see multiple groupings of the letters making up the title, all gathered together, overlapping but not lined up, and the weird thing is that they are all actually in focus, all in varying degrees of opaque or transparency, more or less "there", but all have cleanly defined edges. The whole image just seems fuzzy because there's too many of them all bunched up and overlapping.
Closing one or the other eye doesn't change this or subtract any of the "copies".
I researched a bit about optics, and didn't come across anything which explained this. When a lens goes out of focus, you just get a uniform fuzz. What I experience is very close to that, but when I focus my attention on the fuzz, this odd grouping of in-focus copies becomes apparent.
I asked the woman next to me about this in the theater, (also a glasses wearer), and she didn't know what I was talking about at first, but then said, "Hold on... Yes. I think I see what you mean."
Does anybody else experience this?
I'm near-sighted, (that is, objects up close are in sharp focus, but things far away get fuzzy. I can't drive safely without glasses because road signs are unreadable.)
Normally, I don't pay much attention to the fuzziness of things. I just live with it. (I tend not to bother with glasses). But as I found myself staring at people on stage for prolonged periods, (lots of sitting with guitars on stools), I remembered an odd question which I'd never yet solved to my satisfaction.
People were fuzzy, yes, but it's an odd kind of fuzzy.
When I pay close attention to a blurred visual, such as when I look at the title of a book from across a room, I see multiple groupings of the letters making up the title, all gathered together, overlapping but not lined up, and the weird thing is that they are all actually in focus, all in varying degrees of opaque or transparency, more or less "there", but all have cleanly defined edges. The whole image just seems fuzzy because there's too many of them all bunched up and overlapping.
Closing one or the other eye doesn't change this or subtract any of the "copies".
I researched a bit about optics, and didn't come across anything which explained this. When a lens goes out of focus, you just get a uniform fuzz. What I experience is very close to that, but when I focus my attention on the fuzz, this odd grouping of in-focus copies becomes apparent.
I asked the woman next to me about this in the theater, (also a glasses wearer), and she didn't know what I was talking about at first, but then said, "Hold on... Yes. I think I see what you mean."
Does anybody else experience this?