Near point
In visual perception, the near point is the closest point at which an object can be placed and still form a focused image on the retina, within the eye's accommodation range. The other limit to the eye's accommodation range is the far point.
A normal eye is considered to have a near point at 25 cm. A person with hyperopia or presbyopia would have a near point further than 25 cm away.
Sometimes, near point is also given in diopters (see Presbyopia § Mechanism), which refers to the inverse of the distance stated above (e.g. a normal eye would have a near point of )
Vision correction
A person with hyperopia has NP > 25 cm, and hence is unable to bring an object 25 cm away into sharp focus. A corrective lens can be used to correct hyperopia by imaging an object at distance D = 25 cm onto a virtual image at the patient's near point. From the thin lens formula, the required lens will have optical power P given by[1]
.
The calculation can be further improved by taking into account the distance between the spectacle lens and the human eye, which is usually about 1.5 cm:
.
For example, if a person has NP = 1 m, then the optical power needed is P = +3.24 diopters where one diopter is the reciprocal of one meter.
References
- "Vision Correction | Physics". courses.lumenlearning.com. Retrieved 2019-12-05.