Given the prevalence and potential impact of visual displays, head mounted, virtual reality and assisted reality devices, it is important for the optical engineer working in these areas to know the basics of the optics of the eye. The eye will be treated as an optical system and various aspects will be discussed.

Given the prevalence and potential impact of visual displays, head mounted, virtual reality and assisted reality devices, it is important for the optical engineer working in these areas to know about how the human eye works and how auxiliary devices can be interfaced to the eye. Devices vary by their relationship to the user’s eyes. Various visual factors, both perceptual and optical, will have to be taken into account. These factors include accommodation, aging, color, contrast, eye relief distance, field of view, flicker, glare, resolution, stereopsis, motion and aberrations of the eye. Design of such optical systems requires knowledge of the metrics of visual performance in spatial, temporal and color domains. These factors are important when selecting head-mounted displays for specific applications. These optical and human factors performance metrics constrain the design and use of such devices. I will describe and discuss these various factors.

Special functions are used extensively in optics and photonics. These functions (such as Bessel, Airy, Legendre, Hankel, Zernike, etc.) arise as solutions to certain second order differential equations which populate optical science. The type of special function depends upon the co-ordinate system. In this short course I will describe the various functions, under what conditions they arise and some applications. The course will be introductory and requires a knowledge of calculus, introductory second order linear differential equations (power series solution) and vectors. We will cover the gamut of special functions, and discuss their use in various optical situations.