this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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For me, before I got laser surgery, I was once swimming in the ocean at a very big and popular beach. I was wearing contacts because obviously wearing glasses in the water is next to impossible. I got hit by a big wave, tossed around, and lost my contacts. Now I was almost completely blind, in a foreign country where I knew almost nobody, and trying to find my beach towel and bag among thousands of others. I actually can't remember how I resolved that problem, but I do remember the massive stress and panic being blind like that caused. When I got back from the trip, I got my eyes fixed within a year.
but you didn't have any massive stress or panic thinking about the worms that burrow into your eyes after wearing contacts in the ocean?
No, I was on vacation on Earth, not Proxima Centari 6.
Not necessarily useful to you any longer, but you can utilize a pinhole lens for situations like that. You can even use your hands/fingers to make the lens. You’ll look fucking ridiculous, but I doubt it’s bother you too much when it’s that or being blind.
To expand on that, you make a very small hole by curling your index finger, and look through that hole.
Just tried this and am now reading comments below to learn what the actual fuck. That works. This random internet advice isn't a lie.
just tried it and it work?? how
When your eyes are open and unobscured, light is coming in from every direction. The lens is shaped in such a way that light rays parallel to the eye's axis are focused on the macula, the center of your sharp vision. A near-sighted (myopic) eye focuses those parallel rays in front of the retina, and a far-sighted (hypermetropic) eye focuses them behind. The farther away the ray is from the eye's axis, the more it is refracted by the lens, and the more obvious its out-of-focus-ness becomes if the lens has an incorrect shape.
Corrective eyewear works by refracting the light before it enters the eye and essentially cancelling out the lens' imperfections.
A pinhole works by obscuring light rays that are farther from the axis and contribute to the blurry image, only letting through light rays that are near the axis, already aligned more or less with the macula, don't have to be refracted as sharply, and don't contribute as much to the blurry image. This is why the camera obscura works, and why apertures in modern photography are used to control both the image's exposure and the strength of the depth of field.
Afaik if you're myopic, your eyeballs are too long so the plane of focus created by looking at a far away object is no longer on your retina. So i think by looking through a pinhole you widen the depth of field. This means even stuff you don't focus on is seen sharper.
I wonder if this also works for hyperopia...
huh! our bodies are so weird
Yeah, but not only our eyes/bodies are weird. If you want to know more about weird eyes look up goat pupils (they have horizontal pupils the can rotate 50% to be always level with the ground) or nautilus pinhole eyes (early stage of our eyes with no lense).
I use it to read with hyperopia
Big spectacles hate this trick!
Is this why I can see so much better in VR? Smaller field of view? I always assumed it as kind of a side effect of the depth of field hacks they do but FOV would make sense.
I learned this in school. It's because it focuses the light through a narrow passage which increases the details. It's also how cameras originally worked.
Optics.
That has limits. Not sure what it comes down to exactly, but under the most ideal conditions I have pulled off yet, I'd estimate it improves sight by 3-4.
-8 with the fov of a pinhole is still blind.
Now all I wonder is how the hell you solved that issue.
So do I.
So, what I think happened was that I knew roughly where my stuff was. When I went to play in the waves I basically went straight out from my towel. Because of the rip currents I was being pushed sideways while in the waves, but I mostly kept trying to correct for that so that I didn't wander too far from my stuff. I am pretty sure about that, because that's what I always do at the beach. I always hate being pushed around by rip currents and am really worried about getting caught in the undertow so I try to stick to the same part of the beach.
When I got tossed by the huge wave(s) I did end up getting moved sideways. I remember that because I remember how out of control I was. But, I suspect it wasn't too far. So, when I went to search for my stuff I wasn't searching the entire beach, just a small section of it.
I think I remembered what colours my beach towel was, so I think I just wandered that section of beach, squinting so I could see a bit better, looking for a towel with roughly the right colours and with nobody on it. Then when I thought I had the right one I crouched down to see if I could recognize the bag I brought.
I don't think I asked for help, which would have been the smart option. But, I was a shy kid in a foreign country so I am pretty sure I didn't do that.
But really, I don't remember. I just have a clear memory of how helpless I felt, and a vague memory of wandering up and down the beach. The rest is just reconstructing how I think it probably happened based on vague memories and what I know about myself.
Before my wife got the surgery, she used her phones camera to look around. She used to jokingly say that she is a cyborg.
Regarding the topic. For her the procedure was also a game changer.
The worst one is when you wake up having drunk a little bit too much and you can't find your glasses. You are now effectively blind and helpless and hungover.
If I was at home, I always knew where I had some backup glasses. But yeah, wake up at a friend's house or something and you're screwed.
I once had a friend forget to take out his contacts when drunk. He woke up bleeding from his eyes and struggling to get the things out in severe pain...
maybe not in the case of swimming but when you have your phone around you can always turn on your camera and then look at what it's showing you
If you can find it
Depends on what issue you have, I get intense headaches/nausea/dizziness from looking at digital screens without my glasses for more than 20 seconds or so. The longer I look at them the worse it gets and longer it lasts. So it's not really viable.
yeah same, but if all you use it for is to scan the room to find your glasses then it works quite well!
i have prescription swimming goggles
Yep, a good idea, but if you use them when playing in the ocean and are hit by a big wave, they can be knocked off.
fair enough, when I think about it theyre probably not better than the contacts in that sense
That’s actually awesome, I didn’t know those existed.
The answer to almost all of those is contacts.