What is actually lost
The years before anyone notices.
Dry AMD does not announce itself. Long before small print becomes unreadable, it takes away the ability to tell one shade from the next: faces flatten, edges stop separating, and a lamp that was bright enough last winter is not bright enough now. Move through the stages, and move your pointer over the picture — the loss goes wherever you look.
Move your pointer over the picture and the lost area follows it, the way a real scotoma follows the eye. On a phone, tap where you want to look.
Healthy retina
Fine detail, colour and contrast are all intact at the point of fixation. This is the baseline everything below is measured against.
What this simulation cannot show
The lost area is drawn dark so that it can be seen. Patients more often describe grey, blur or simple absence, because the brain fills the gap in, which is part of why early disease goes unreported. Here the area follows your pointer; in life it follows the eye, and no amount of looking around moves it aside. The severity shown is representative of each stage, not a measurement of any patient, and both eyes are usually affected at different rates, which masks the loss further.
The unmet need
Why this is the window that matters.
The two stages where a patient reports least are the two stages where the retina is still there to protect. By the time atrophy reaches the fovea, the photoreceptors it took are gone and no therapy returns them.
That gap between when the disease is detectable and when the patient notices it is exactly where community optometry already sees these people, and exactly where “watch and wait” has been the only thing on offer.