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From this press release this appears to have only 60 electrodes (and I assume only grayscale).

So they wired a PXL2000 to his head. Awesome!

Really, though, it is pretty cool.

From this press release this appears to have only 60 electrodes (and I assume only grayscale). This is definitely remarkable progress, but still nowhere close to achieving a bionic eye that can come even close to rivaling the real human eye.

The question they're also answering (besides how well does this work) is how well can the brain interpret simple images into more complex images that would allow someone to get by in life. That may be as interesting, if not more interesting, than the actual experiment with the device.

I'm a student at UCLA working on a similar project called Retinal Prosthetic writing code in Visual C++ and Intel's OpenCV library. Check out their site:

http://www.judylab.org/research/projects/George/in dex.htm

We're running a simulation of what the surgeon is doing by having the subject wear goggles with a s-video input (it's those fancy expensive goggles to watch movies or to game on). Similar to the article, a camera is attached to the front of the goggles. The input feeds into the computer, chugs through my code, and displays an image meant to simulate varying amounts of electrodes (4x4, 16x16, 64x64) in various configurations (wide screen vision anyone?). All this goes on while the subject tries to accomplish tasks (writing a check, discerning between a fork and knife, etc).

Also, check out a company working on implementing this idea:

http://www.2-sight.com/

As always, lot's of geek talk in here with not much on topic comments...

Now i AM really interested in this technique as i'm one those people that actually HAS been blind. Actually still am on one eye. Anyways.
The whole technique is still very premature and the only thing such a blind person can get now is some very vague vision of things with a few dots. Nothing more. Indeed like someone else mentioned something like 16 by 16 dots and your brains are doing the rest. Pretty useless for doing day to day stuff like reading a book, blog or even slashdot.

The article mentions that they are "the first one" yadayada marketing blah. In fact, there is an american company called second sight (http://www.2-sight.com/ ) which is doing this type of thing as well.

For now the only thing i can say is: Let's hope you don't get blind as the alternatives are pretty cumbersome.

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Wil

If you go to their website and check out the graphics it's kind of depressing really. To me this is really low tech stuff.