Lenses — one or two?

Lenses is a visit to the strangest optician in the world. The eye chart glows on the wall, you look through the glasses, and every time you tap, a new pair of lenses clicks into place. The first pair is almost normal. Then the letters start to breathe, split into rainbows, drip down the chart, turn into cats, fish and owls, grow teeth and eyes and stare back at you, fold into a kaleidoscope or fall into an endless tunnel. Outside the glasses the world stays blurry, like when you take your glasses off.

How to play

The glasses work like a real trial frame at the optician, one eye at a time. Tap a lens and the next lens slides into it, the new view spreading from your finger like a drop of light while the chart jumps. Grab the rim and turn it: the lens rotates on its degree scale, click by click, and the whole view turns with it. Slide up or down inside a lens to focus: each new lens arrives a little blurry, and the optician whispers "better?" or "worse?" until it snaps sharp. The dials set the sphere, the cylinder (which stretches the view along the axis), the axis and the strength of the effect, for the left lens, the right lens or both, and six tints color the glass. Drag outside the lenses to stir the view like warm glass. Pick any of the sixteen lenses from the list, change the frames (round tortoiseshell, square, heart, or no frame at all), shuffle, let Auto change the lenses for you, or save the picture.

Why it's satisfying

It is the eye exam everybody remembers, "one... or two?", except that every answer is wrong in a beautiful way. Turning a lens clicks like a real phoropter, focusing feels like finding the right station on an old radio, and each new lens is a little surprise with a chord. Nothing can go wrong: there is no line to read and nothing to win.

About

Lenses is part of Alcy, forty-six free contemplative micro-games in your browser. For more optical wonders: Kaleidoscope, Tunnel, Ink.