Rod-Cone Dark Adaptation Curve
Interactive 2D model of retinal dark adaptation: watch rod and cone photopigment regenerate after a bleaching flash and trace the classic biphasic sensitivity curve, including the rod-cone break.
After a bright flash bleaches your visual pigment, your eyes take many minutes to recover full night vision — and they do it in two distinct stages. This simulator models the photochemistry directly: a bleaching flash sets an initial bleached fraction in both rod and cone photopigment, each pool regenerates on its own numerically-integrated exponential-recovery ODE, and Rushton's photochemical relation converts remaining bleach into a threshold-elevation curve for each system. Because cones regenerate fast but have a small sensitivity range while rods regenerate slowly but reach far greater sensitivity, the overall visible threshold follows the lower of the two curves — producing the classic biphasic dark-adaptation curve with its "rod-cone break". A 2D patch of cone- and rod-shaped photoreceptor dots brightens on the flash and visibly dims back to baseline as pigment regenerates, alongside a live-plotted sensitivity graph, a bisection-found analytic crossover marker, and readouts for elapsed dark time, threshold elevation, dominant system and the measured break time.
Adjust bleaching flash strength and observe how cone and rod pigments regenerate, tracing the dark adaptation curve.
2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install