About Refrac
Refrac shows what a prescription does to the world, and how a lens puts it right.
Turn the dial to a power, and the photo blurs the way an eye with that power sees it. A minus eye loses the far things first; a plus eye loses the near ones. Past half a dioptre either way, a lens appears. Drag it over the scene, and everything under it turns sharp again.
Astigmatism smears the scene along one direction, at the axis you pick. The colour blindness filters take out red, green or blue, so you can see a scene the way a person with a missing cone sees it.
Each photo has its own depth.
Every scene starts as a real photograph from Unsplash. I ran each one through Depth Anything V2, a model that estimates how far away every pixel is. Refrac then blurs each pixel by how far it falls from the distance the eye can focus at. A gondola a metre away blurs differently from the palaces across the canal, just as it would for your eye.
Refrac teaches; it can't test your eyes.
The distances come from a model's estimate, and the colour filters simulate how a missing cone changes colour. Use Refrac to understand a prescription you already have. If the world looks soft to you, see an optometrist.
The photographers.
- Trocadéro, Paris by Fabien Maurin
- Ingjaldshólskirkja, Iceland by TravelerX
- Grand Canal, Venice by Lens by Benji
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam by Jordan Pulmano
- Fushimi Inari, Kyoto by Shai Pal
- Durga Pujo by Prateek Saxena
- Radhanagar, Andaman by Amit Jain
- Oia, Santorini by Michael Mitrakos
- Red Sea, Egypt by Aviv Perets
- Islands of NEOM, Red Sea by NEOM
Who made it.
I'm Anirudh Shrinivas, and I made Refrac. Say hello on X at @anirudhux.