Allying high-resolution with a large field-of-view (FOV) is of great importance in the fields of biology and medicine, but particularly challenging when imaging non-flat living samples such as the retina. Indeed, high-resolution is normally achieved with adaptive optics (AO) and scanning methods, which considerably reduce the useful FOV and increase the system complexity. Here, we introduce coherence gate shaping for FF-OCT, to optically shape the coherence gate geometry to match the retinal curvature, thus achieving a larger FOV than previously possible. Using this instrument, we obtained high-resolution images of photoreceptors close to the foveal center without AO and with a 1x1m² FOV. This novel advance facilitates the extraction of photoreceptor-based biomarkers and 4D monitoring of individual photoreceptors. We compare our findings with AO-assisted ophthalmoscopes, highlighting the potential of FF-OCT, as a compact system, to become a routine clinical imaging technique.
