This paper shows that the acuity of human visual perception can be increased by correcting as many as the first twelve aberrations of the eye by using an adaptive optical system with feedback based on a subjective evaluation of the sharpness with which the object under consideration is perceived. The test subjects were able to correct the visual sharpness by changing the amplitude of the orthogonal modes of a deformable mirror. The participants in the experiments with strong high-order aberrations reported moderate or even significant improvement of the visual acuity when they viewed a USAF1951 test table. © 2005 Optical Society of America@en