About the Simulator

Slit-Lamp Simulator is an educational project created by Dr Harrison Howell to help learners develop the coordination, focusing, and retinal orientation skills used during slit-lamp fundoscopy.

Development began in 2025, with the first public version released in December 2025. The simulator has remained under active development since its release, with ongoing improvements to realism, educational content, accessibility, and device support.

Copyright and Ownership

Slit-Lamp Simulator, including its source code, layout, interface design, educational content, simulation behaviour, original text, curated retinal image presentation, and related assets, is owned by Harrison James Wallace Howell, MD, unless otherwise stated.

© 2026 Harrison James Wallace Howell, MD. All rights reserved.

Permitted Use

This website, including the retinal laser mode, is a simplified simulation for education only. You may use it for informal learning and exploration of the concepts shown. It must not be used for formal clinical or procedural training, competency assessment, certification, accreditation, or credentialing.

The simulator is not a medical device and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It must not be used to guide patient care, select treatment settings, or determine readiness to perform an examination or procedure. It is not a substitute for supervised clinical training, professional judgement, or real-world patient examination.

Images, optical behaviour, laser patterns, focus cues, treatment marks, guides and safety blocks are simplified illustrations. They do not reproduce every feature or risk of real equipment or living tissue. Successful use of the simulator does not establish clinical competence or treatment safety.

Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability

Subject to rights and liabilities that cannot lawfully be excluded, the simulator is provided as available, without any guarantee of accuracy, completeness, uninterrupted operation, or suitability for formal training or clinical use.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Harrison James Wallace Howell, MD, and the site's operator and contributors exclude liability for loss, damage, injury, costs or claims arising from use of, or reliance on, the simulator for formal training, competency assessment, certification, or patient care, including where such liability is alleged to arise from negligence. These uses are expressly prohibited by these terms.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee, statutory right, remedy or liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted or modified, including under the Australian Consumer Law where it applies.

Restrictions

• You must not download, copy, scrape, extract, reproduce, redistribute, publish, sell, sublicense, or otherwise repurpose the retinal images or other visual assets from this website.
• You must not use the retinal images, simulator outputs, or related visual assets for artificial intelligence model training, machine learning datasets, model evaluation, data mining, or similar computational uses.
• You must not copy, clone, reverse engineer, adapt, reproduce, or build a substantially similar simulator using the protected source code, visual design, content, asset selection, arrangement, or distinctive educational expression from this website.
• You must not remove, obscure, or alter copyright notices, credits, watermarks, attribution, or ownership information displayed in or associated with this website.

Copyright law does not protect general ideas, but it does protect original expression. This means the specific implementation, code, visual design, structure, images, written content, and distinctive presentation of this simulator must not be copied or reproduced without written permission from Harrison James Wallace Howell, MD.

Privacy and Data Handling

This simulator does not require an account or login. It does not use third-party analytics, advertising trackers, tracking pixels, or browser fingerprinting. The site operator does not sell, rent, or trade visitor personal information and does not use visitor information for advertising or behavioural profiling.

Like every internet service, the website cannot be delivered without technical connection information being processed transiently by network and hosting infrastructure. The site is hosted on DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean may independently process and retain limited log, device, configuration, and usage information to operate and secure its services, provide support, meet legal obligations, and improve its infrastructure. Those provider-level practices are outside the site operator’s direct control and are governed by DigitalOcean’s Privacy Policy and Data Processing Agreement. Accordingly, this notice does not claim that hosting or network providers process no technical information.

Server Logs

At the time of this notice, the web server may generate standard technical access and error logs. Depending on server configuration and the type of request, these logs may contain an IP address, request date and time, requested page or file, response status, referring page, and browser user-agent information. Where such logs exist, the site operator uses them only for service operation, security, troubleshooting, and aggregate traffic assessment—not for advertising, behavioural profiling, data brokerage, or sale. The operator’s intended configuration is to minimise or disable visitor-level logging and remove historical logs where reasonably practicable.

Aggregate Visit Counting

If the aggregate visit counter is enabled, the browser sends a same-origin signal no more than once per browser session. The server-side counter is designed to store only one running total and not a separate record for each visit. It does not intentionally store IP addresses, locations, device details, browser types, referrers, or visitor identifiers. A temporary session marker may be stored in the visitor’s browser solely to avoid counting repeated page loads during the same session; it contains no identifier, is not transmitted as visitor data, and normally expires when that browser session ends. The aggregate total cannot identify unique visitors or reconstruct individual activity.

Optional Feedback

Selecting “Share feedback” opens a Google Forms page operated by Google. No feedback is automatically sent to Google merely by using the simulator. If a visitor chooses to open or submit that form, Google will process the connection and any voluntarily submitted information under Google’s own terms and privacy practices, and the submitted response may be received by the site operator.

Intellectual Property Permission

Any commercial, institutional, research, publication, redistribution, derivative, or AI-related use of the simulator, retinal images, code, interface, or educational material requires prior written permission from Harrison James Wallace Howell, MD.

To request permission, report bugs, or ask questions, contact: slitlampsim@gmail.com.

Changes to These Terms

These terms may be updated from time to time. Continued use of the website after changes are posted means you accept the updated terms.