Inverse optical design: Building and testing an artificial eye

We present an optical design and describe the way to build and test a new model of the human eye. This model is intended to work specifically with wide field angles featuring invariant aberrations across the field. Our model is a compromise between the simplicity of the design (using only two plano-convex lenses) and its ability to imitate the real properties of ocular aberrations. The position of the aperture stop in the system as well as the concentricity of the first and the last surfaces allowed us to control the field aberrations. We model the artificial eye using the optical design software Zemax. Our ray-tracing analysis and experimental results are discussed in relation to the inverse optical design, which enables us to find the imperfections in the artificial eye with interferometric testing. Measuring wavefront aberrations in double pass on axis we could identify the manufacturing errors in lens characteristics as well as find their misalignment errors. The inverse optical design involves modification of the original eye model parameters (thickness, radius of curvatures, asphericity, lens centration and tilts) to match the experimental measurements of the wavefront aberrations. We identified the sources of errors and verified that the overall performance of the artificial eye is comparable with the theoretical wide-field eye model, which is based on the average properties of the real human eye.