Very fast wave-front measurements at the human eye with a custom CMOS-based Hartmann-Shack sensor

We describe what we believe to be the first wave-front measurements of the human eye at a sampling rate of 300 Hz with a custom Hartmann-Shack wave-front sensor that uses complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. This sensor has been developed to replace standard charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras and the slow software image processing that is normally used to reconstruct the wave front from the focal-plane image of a lenslet array. We describe the sensor's principle of operation and introduce the performance with static wave fronts. The system has been used to measure human-eye wave-front aberrations with a bandwidth of 300 Hz, which is approximately an order of magnitude faster than with standard software-based solutions. Finally, we discuss the measured data and consider further improvements to the system. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.