Notes:

This slide shows the distored wavefront reflected out an aberrated eye. When reflected light rays emerge from an imperfect eye, they are no longer parallel . Consequently, when they strike the array of lensets they will be focused into a disordered collection of spot images.

By analyzing the exact location of each tiny spot in this disordered array, we can work backwards to calculate the slope of the aberrated wavefront when it entered the corresponding lenslet. We then mathematically integrate this slope information to obtain the shape of the aberrated wavefront.

The shape of the aberrated wavefront is a fundamental measurement of the optical quality of the eye called the "wavefront aberration function". This function lies at the heart of a rich optical theory that allows us to calculate the retinal image of any object, to assess the quality of that retinal image quantitatively, and to predict visual performance on visual tasks. For these reasons the development of a practical wavefront analyzer has been a major technological advance in visual optics research.