During my college days, I happened to break my glasses one day. I guess you could imagine all the frustration and inconvenience I faced. With blurred vision, I could hardly learn anything during the lectures.
How I hoped that I could have a pair of binoculus with me. So I decided to create a “Binoculus” myself – I made a fist and put it up to one eye while closing the other eye. I opened the fist just enough to create a small hole to look through. Wow, I realised I could actually see more clearly this way.
From the name “Pinhole glasses”, you will probably think that they are made of glass. Well, they are actually made of opaque metal or plastic, with many tiny holes on the material.
When the user looks through any of the many small holes, these holes reduce the width of the bundle of diverging rays coming from each point on the viewed object. The pupil may be wide open, but only the central portion is receiving light. The improvement in visual acuity can be striking.
A good news is that pinhole glasses can bring about clearer vision in eyes refractive errors such as myopia, hyperopia (farsightedness), presbyopia (diminished focusing range with age) and astigmatism.
In fact, the native people of Alaska have long used this principle by wearing glasses with narrow slits to look through, thus blocking out much of the glare from the sunshine reflecting off the snow and ice.
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Recover Your Vision With Pinhole Glasses
You can make your own pinhole glasses using a piece of black paper card, as shown in the diagram below.
And if you found the DIY pinhole glasses touching the eye lashes, you can add a tiny piece of paper near the bridge of your nose.
Warm Up – Neck Exercise To Improve Blood Circulation to Your Eyes
To improve your vision, it’s not enough to just put on the glasses daily.
Many studies have shown that these glasses would be useful only if users incorporate selective eye exercises in their daily routine.
Before performing the eye exercises, do remember to perform warm up. We recommend the neck exercise to improve blood circulation to your eyes.
Effective Eye Exercises For Pinhole Glasses Users
The first exercise helps to strengthen your eye focal flexibility. In this exercise, you would need a vision chart.
1. Hang the vision chart about 3m away.
2. Put on your pinhole glasses and focus on a ring in the vision chart for about 10 seconds.
3. Shift your focus to any hole of your glasses. Maintain focus for 3 seconds.
4. Repeat step (2) and (3) for about 7 – 10 minutes daily.
5. At the end of the eye exercises, perform palming for 3 minutes or more.
When your vision has improved, the time needed to re-focus from far to near would be shorten. Slowly increase the distance of vision chart from you.