Adaptation (adaptation)

Anyone who has already went directly from a brightly lit room into a dark room or after waking up from the dark bedroom into the illuminated bathroom, knows this feeling. At first you don't see really well, because the eyes first have to get used to the new environment in such a sudden change of brightness. Exactly this adjustment process is called adaptation.

The course of the adaptation and thus also the time that the eyes need to adapt are determined by the light densities at the beginning and at the end of the brightness change. When changing from the dark to the bright, the eyes are usually used normally after just a few seconds and see perfectly again. The other way around, however, this is not possible so quickly. The adaptation process takes much longer from the light to the dark, which can even take several minutes.

An adaptation is not a sudden change, but a process in which the vision is gradually increasing again. This determines the respective adaptation state.