Traditionally prescribing ophthalmic lens to a wearer involves fitting a potential wearer having an eyesight defect with ophthalmic lenses having different optical characteristics and then selecting the lenses which provide the best optical performance for the wearer. Such techniques suffer the drawback that the wearer has to go through the process of putting off and taking off a number of spectacles and may only be exposed to a limited selection of lenses which may not include the optical lens optimal for correcting the particular eyesight defect.
To address such issues various solutions based on virtual reality techniques which simulate the optical effect of an ophthalmic lens have been proposed. For example, WO 2007/056795 describes a method of simulating an optical defect of a selected ophthalmic lens design which includes retrieving simulation data for the selected ophthalmic lens design and processing the simulation data to generate a virtual output image simulating the optical defect.
A drawback of the system described in WO 2007/056795 is that it requires complex data processing techniques and a high calculating power to provide an average quality output image. This leads to prohibitive costs and complex system requirements for implementation of the virtual simulation method.