12-05-2007, 02:35 AM
I copied this from my blog because I really would like as much feedback as possible. I had a weird experience yesterday where I was looking at my white mouse cursor on a black screen (from about 3 ft) and I could clearly see the cursor - but six or eight of them stamped around in a circle. My experience with a black cursor on a white background is just seeing fuzz so this came as a total shock to me. Is this really what BLUR is or is my eye doing something weird? My eyesight is about 20/530 and normally to see something that small clearly I have to be 3 inches away! Here is what I wrote on my blog, please, any input would be appreciated to help me understand what my eye is doing! Do other myopes see this as well?
I always thought that things appear blurry to me because of the whole argument that my eye is elongated and it is like a camera out of focus. Yesterday at work I had an experience that is causing me to wonder if my understanding of that is true. I have set the background of one of my computer programs to be black with light letters. To take a break I removed my glasses and looked around the office as usual. Then I was looking at the computer screen. I sit with my face about 3 ft away, which for someone with my vision (-7.00 glasses, 20/530 eyesight) means that the size of one line of 12 point writing is blurred to appear as thick as 3 or 4 lines of writing. I was looking at this blur and noticed suddenly that I could make out very clearly the letter âCâ! Huh? I was completely confused because this wasnât like a clear flash, there was a significant blur around it, and in order to see a letter of that size with such sharpness I normally have to have my nose 3 inches away! To simplify things, I looked at my cursor only against the dark background (instead of the lines of text) and then I understood. What I see is not the light being blurred out, instead, itâs like the point Iâm seeing is being stamped around in a circle. For example, consider the letter âIâ on itâs own in white on a black background. What I saw looked like this letter âIâ very clearly (but in various shades from grey to bright white) stamped in a circle around where the actual letter should be (about 8 stamps). The problem is it is difficult to count them because every time that I blink they shift around a bit. What is this???? When I examined a line of text again I found that the whole line was stamped like this and sometimes I could clearly read the entire top or bottom âstampâ. Weird, I need to do some research on this and find out what is going on. Perhaps it is central fixation gone wrong? Or is this really what âblurryâ is?
I always thought that things appear blurry to me because of the whole argument that my eye is elongated and it is like a camera out of focus. Yesterday at work I had an experience that is causing me to wonder if my understanding of that is true. I have set the background of one of my computer programs to be black with light letters. To take a break I removed my glasses and looked around the office as usual. Then I was looking at the computer screen. I sit with my face about 3 ft away, which for someone with my vision (-7.00 glasses, 20/530 eyesight) means that the size of one line of 12 point writing is blurred to appear as thick as 3 or 4 lines of writing. I was looking at this blur and noticed suddenly that I could make out very clearly the letter âCâ! Huh? I was completely confused because this wasnât like a clear flash, there was a significant blur around it, and in order to see a letter of that size with such sharpness I normally have to have my nose 3 inches away! To simplify things, I looked at my cursor only against the dark background (instead of the lines of text) and then I understood. What I see is not the light being blurred out, instead, itâs like the point Iâm seeing is being stamped around in a circle. For example, consider the letter âIâ on itâs own in white on a black background. What I saw looked like this letter âIâ very clearly (but in various shades from grey to bright white) stamped in a circle around where the actual letter should be (about 8 stamps). The problem is it is difficult to count them because every time that I blink they shift around a bit. What is this???? When I examined a line of text again I found that the whole line was stamped like this and sometimes I could clearly read the entire top or bottom âstampâ. Weird, I need to do some research on this and find out what is going on. Perhaps it is central fixation gone wrong? Or is this really what âblurryâ is?