Throughout the last decade, augmented reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) have gradually become a substantial part of modern life, with increasing applications ranging from gaming and driver assistance to medical training. Owing to the tremendous progress in miniaturized displays, cameras, and sensors, HMDs are now used for the diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of several eye diseases. In this review, we discuss the current state-of-the-art as well as potential uses of AR in ophthalmology. This review includes the following topics: (i) underlying optical technologies, displays and trackers, holography, and adaptive optics; (ii) accommodation, 3D vision, and related problems such as presbyopia, amblyopia, strabismus, and refractive errors; (iii) AR technologies in lens and corneal disorders, in particular cataract and keratoconus; (iv) AR technologies in retinal disorders including age-related macular degeneration (AMD), glaucoma, color blindness, and vision simulators developed for other types of low-vision patients.

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Cataract is the most common cause of preventable blindness and vision loss where the only treatment is surgical replacement of the natural lens with an intraocular lens. Computer-generated holography (CGH) enables to control phase, size, and shape of the light beam entering through the eye-pupil. We developed a holographic vision simulator to assess visual acuity for patients to experience the postoperative corrected vision before going through surgery. A holographically shaped light beam is directed onto the retina using small non-cataractous regions of the lens with the help of a pupil tracker. A Snellen chart hologram is shown to subjects at desired depth with myopia and hyperopia correction. Tests with 13 patients demonstrated substantial improvements in visual acuity and the simulator results are consistent with the post-operative vision tests. Holographic simulator overperforms the existing vision simulators, which are limited to static pinhole exit pupils and incapable of correcting aberrations.

The transition dynamics of photons between an optical soliton in a nonlinear dielectric waveguide and a spatially coupled surface-plasmon excitation on a parallel flat metal surface can be formulated in analogy to that of a Josephson junction of two-level (double-well) Bose-Einstein condensates, albeit with a nonlinear coupling that inherently depends on the population imbalance of the levels. The present work demonstrates that asymmetric Rosen-Zener-like transitions can be obtained through this optical Josephson junction, by turning on and off the coupling across a hyperbolically varying separation between the soliton and the surface-plasmon. The transitions can generate full population transfer, population splitting, or merging between the quasistationary initial and final states, which are defined by a fixed population imbalance in the decoupled limit. Transitions from a pure soliton or pure surface-plasmon initial state are found to be robust against the relative phase, whereas the transitions from an initial state with mixed population depend strongly on the relative phase. The soliton-surface-plasmon system also bears similarities to the spatially coupled optical waveguides which are introduced further as the classical analogs of the spatial adiabatic passage and stimulated Raman adiabatic passage mechanisms in quantum and atom optics.