Slashdot Mirror
Bionic Eyes for Everyone
Rob Riggs writes "As seen on this SlashCode using site, scientists at the University of Rochester are working on a project to bring adaptive optics, technology used in ground-based astronomy, to the human eye. They expect to achieve 20/10 vision and enhanced contrast for everyone, but this article claims 20/2.5 is ultimately possible." The best thing about this story is that the submitter picked the rarely-used "Upgrades" category for it.
Uhm .. yeah ... "Hey ... look at the bones she got !"
Samba Information HQ
However how many people would be willing to put up with the heavy equipment now used. But there are many early adopters of any new technology...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
How does the 20 - scale work anyway? Is there a maximum (20/0)? Is it linear or logarithmic with respect to the quality of your vision? Is the denominator just a measurement? Why 20, is it just normalized to average vision? Any opthimologists in the peanut gallery?
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While this would be good if it really works and is safe. Having bad vision sucks. Since its from staring at a TV with a TRS-80 pluged into it to having 3 monitors next to each other, most of my life is spent in from of some kind of image device. Without contacts I get so see shapes and blur. I would like to correct that problem but I dont think now we are at a level where these things have been tested for LONG term usage. I dont need to go blind in 20 years because some company overlooked a problem in it's haste to get this to the market to make money.
Once tested and proven for long term usage these sort of procedures will help people with bad vision from having to deal with contacts and glasses. Maybe then we can all become fighter pilots and race car drivers!
Lord Arathres
stainless steel
You probably would prefer infra-red, x-ray would require emitting dangerous radiations and show what every girl had for lunch !
I've always been very fascinated with the prospects of bionic eyes, as a visual artist they are my most valued assets. I would be mortified if something ever happened to them, and having a viable replacement available would be the difference between life and death for me.
I currently have 20/10 vision naturally, and I must say it is a huge benifit in daily life. To be able to give this to everyone would not dramiatically improve the quality of life for most, but it would be something worth investing a couple of thousand dollars in.
As I'm sure most slashdotters are framiliar with, most sci-fi that discusses bionic eyes touches on the idea of night-vision, zoom, and theremal imaging. All of which sound great, but now that I come to think about it (since this is apparently becoming a sci-reality) I'm a bit concerned with the idea of everyone having thermal vision. Talk about a huge invasion of privacy. I'm an apartment dweller and would not like for other tenants snooping on me simply by looking through the wall. Being that the world is becoming infatuated with voyerism (how many reality TV shows are out there right now?) I would suspect that as soon as you started implanting this sort of thing into people it would very quickly find malicious use.
disc-chord
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
I recently underwent corrective eye surgery and I call it a miracle. I have worn glasses since 3rd grade, and contact lenses since 1978. Over 35 years since I've seen sharply without correction. Before surgery, my sight was at best 20/400. Now, I'm a little better than 20/15. It felt like having "bionic eyes". My wife catches me gazing at the clouds, trees, even the brush on the hillside a mile or so away. I'm seeing so much I've overlooked before. I didn't expect this absolute sharpness. I simply wanted to be free of the confines of glasses and contacts. I even expected to perhaps need reading glasses for close work, but I can still read the smallest print on a dollar bill at 6 inches, so I guess that's good too. Another thing I guess I'm lucky about is that I've had no dry eye problem or irritation at all since I awoke Thursday afternoon. I use the drops anyway, just because, but I could probably do without them.
Anyway, at the post-op, they said it would not be unexpected to have the vision get a little fuzzier and then improve even more over the next week a the corneal swelling maxes out and recedes. I can't imagine it getting any better than this...
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
This neural mosaic is relatively coarse compared to the retinal image, which may introduce artifacts into the neural image and ultimately cause a kind of mis-perception called "aliasing".
I'll wait for the anti-aliasing patch, I think. And I thought I was happy about the GTK patch...
signature smigmature
- James
until the MPAA perfects their copy control enhancements for the human optical nerve.
:)
Movies watermarked for joe blow (SSN 101-69-1984) will not appear as black blobs in the eyes of jane doe.
Fortunately, I already patented this technology.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I have a certain kind of albinism which not only affects my skin pigment, but also my eyes. On a very good day I can achieve maybe 20/150 vision, and it is much more blurry than normal 20/20 and normal eyes as well. As cases go I am in the 99th percentile of *GOOD* vision for people with albinism. I had a friend who was 20/2000 (2000, yes). This is incredibly exciting for me.
My vision is not correctable with glasses, as the problem exists primarily in my retina (lacking rods/cones). Short of something like this I have no way to significantly improve my vision. No laser surgery does this, in fact there is really nothing on the market to do this. Personally, I would be willing to be a test subject or pay $20,000 for this treatment.
If you have correctable vision (say you can get to about 20/40 or so somehow) I envy you. I can't drive, I have to take a magnifier with me anywhere I go, and it is very difficult for me to get around. The consequences of being unable to drive are manifold, most people can hardly comprehend it. I can't live in places without above average to excellent public transpotation. This means only major cities, and only major cities with good transit. For reference, in the US, there are perhaps 5 major cities with really manageable public transport (for me). Of these, I would need to live typically in or within walking distance of the downtown area. It's basically like being told you can only ever live in a select few places.
If you're curious about the '20/x' scale, here's a brief description. The first number (typically 20) is the average distance (in any unit you like) that an individual can see an object with clairty. The x is the distance at which, if I could see the object at '20' a person with normal vision could get the same image. So if I have, say, 20/150 then what I see at 20 feet, you could see at 150 feet. That is a factor of 7.5x. The thought of having 20/20 or better vision is like a distant dream for me, and the faster this comes around the happier I will be.
Needless to say, I do not play golf.
-wd
--
chip norkus(rl); white_dragon('net'); wd@routing.org
mercenary albino programmer for hire
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
Why spend all the money on high tech equipment and surgery? Just do what they did on Gilligan's Island. Munch on some radioactive carrots.
could become useful if you're surrounded by a bunch of supermodels =)
Yes, being in the glamorous world of system administration, that situation comes up often.
--
Ever get the feeling that you'll be laying on your deathbed about to kick off and suddenly they'll announce that they have cured every ailment and disease? It's great but it sort of sucks in a way.
yafla!
As seen on this SlashCode using site
There was also a story on this slashcode-using site.
Seriously though, looks like they might be rolling this out a lot sooner than we thought, which is pretty cool. I've put off getting lasik myself partly because I'd like to see how far they can stretch this technology first.
--
and "look at the bone I've got"
A reader over at Plastic expressed concern that humans should perhaps not be buying upgrades for their own bodies. On the contrary, there are circumstances by which it becomes very benificial to augment our bodies where they would otherwise provide a hinderance to us. Admitadly, there are limits. But this is just an extension of the first neanderthal man with a broken (or missing) leg being constructed a crutch to help him walk. It's part of what makes us human. To try to improve the lives of our fellow men. Of course there are limits to the circumstances that our technology should (and can) be used.
For those who missed it, my original post is here, complete with the chain of responses from outraged laser geeks, my counter response, etc.
To recap: my argument is that the Light/Dark spots you see in the speckling of laser light are the individual Pixels (cones and rods, actually) of your own eyes. I ommitted to mention this effect probably comes from the interferance of Laser light on the retina of your eye. The bottom line is that each sensory cell in the eye, be it a cone or a rod, sends one point of brightness data to the brain, thus the speckle effect. This is noted indirectly by this section from the article mentioned above:
Although there are many potential benefits of super-normal visual optics, there is at least one expected penalty. Given a dramatic increase in optical quality of the retinal image, the photoreceptor mosaic will appear relatively coarse by comparison, as shown in Figure 5. As a result of this mismatch, very fine spatial details in the retinal image will be smaller than the distance between neighboring cones and therefore will not be registered properly in the neural image. This mis-representation of the image due to neural undersampling by a relatively coarse array of photoreceptors is called "aliasing". However, for everyday vision the penalty of aliasing is likely to be outweighed by the reward of higher contrast sensitivity and higher detection acuity.
In this context, this causes the aliasing effect because each receptors reports only one dot of light intensity data back to the brain. If the receptors sent more than one data point to the brain at the same time for a higher resolution, then the aliasing effect would still be there, although at a much smaller point.
See my original comments for the full details, etc. but it is still my contention the the effect of seeing the speckles in laser light is the individual variation of reception of light intensity by the individual cells of your eye.
This is a way for you to notice the granuality, the pixels of your eyes.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Adaptive optics is meant to correct tinier flaws in the curvature of the lens of the eye. As the article said, current Lasik machines typically only correct for astigmatism and prescription, but in a fairly smooth manner over the surface of the eye. All this does is provide a more detailed map of the eye. "Bionic" vision, it isn't. I ended up with 20/15 vision after standard Lasik, and no matter what the people who get all excited about this technology think about it, the retina doesn't have enough resolution in terms of rods/cones for anything better than 20/12 vision. 20/10 could only happen with someone who naturally had a gene for a higher retinal density. If you are lacking rods/cones in the eye, no amount of corrective optics in the lens can help. Its like upgrading your video card so you can do 1920x1280x24bit and only having a 640x480 VGA monitor. Nothing but replacing the monitor can help. Along the same lines, nothing but replacing the retina can help if the source of poor vision comes from it, not a misshapen lens. Don't fret though, this technology won't help, but give it ten years, there are already implanted artificial retinas, and I wouldn't be suprised if in ten years bioengineered replacement eyes aren't happening as well. In both of those cases, as long as the nerve density within the optic nerve is normal, then when technology gets advanced enough it can be fixed. (Plus its worth remembering that the area of the retina that needs to be "corrected" to achieve perfect vision is very small, a millimeter or two in diameter. Peripheral vision in virtually everyone is very bad, dozens, if not hundreds, of times worse than their normal vision -- rod/cone and nerve density both are very low outside the very center of the retina)
I have one good eye and one not so good eye, so norally 95% of my vision is with my good eye. Working on my car I got a piece of rust in the good eye and it was subsequently bandaged for a week. The strangest things happened...I really could see fine but the processing of the info was terrible, especially at first...my judgement of position and velocity was way off, and this was NOT due to a lack of depth perception, as I can operate with just my good eye fine.
The most startling occurrence was when I was later brave enough to drive and I was behind a car on the highway. His brake lights came on, in a flash I knew he was stopping but with only my bad eye, not used to processing this kind of info, I couldn't determine how quickly he was decelerating, tapping his brakes or jamming them. I panicked and ripped the bandage off my other eye and instantly I "understood" how everything was moving around me.
New optics would be great, but I guess I really want a CPU upgrade :)
SuperID
Makes me want to go out and get this surgery right now! Except it's not available yet. Still I'm a bit worried about the side effects. At least we don't have to worry about eyeballs collapsing anymore. Until the military starts using this technology on their own pilots and divers, and it gets a lot cheaper, I'm going to hold back.
cryptochrome
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
HAHA!! Upgrades?! Wow!! I'm gonna get the patch as soon as it's available!
JDW
For those of you who don't know what is the meaning of 20/20 vision, it works this way:
20/20 means that you are able to see at 20 feet of distance what a normal person can see at 20 feet, then you have a normal vision.
20/10 means that you see at 20 feet what a normal person sees at 10 feet.
20/100 means that you need to be as close as 20 feet to see what normal people see at 100 feet.
Well, you get how it works, I hope.
I had never heard of this kind of measurements where I live and I wear glasses so I suppose it will help some of you to understand better the meaning of the article.
Isn't there an upper limit to how much information the brain is ready to handle from the optic nerve? I know in my own experience (and those of my friends), when our vision has been over-corrected to 20/15 or even 20/10, headaches are the usual result, because the brain isn't used to dealing with what it's getting. Is this completely unrelated, or is it something the developers have thought about?
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
I seem to recall seeing this in June...
Vision physiologists have determined that
4K x 4K grids are about the finest you can see.
They run testest displaying sine wave stripes
at various wavelengths, color contrasts and distances. Less if there is a lot of motion, dark, or little color contrast.
It seems to me that as you increase the magnification, you will decrease the field covered. As a result this may not be the best thing, way when you are playing point guard.
A better solution would be zoom vision where you can control the magnification.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
As I understand it, the human eye has several times the number of photoreceptive cells lining the optic nerve that you actually use. I remember it being something like 3 times the number you actually use, so most people only use 1/3 the photoreceptors they have in their eyes. In fact, I'm told there are rehabilitative techniques for the human eye that allow people who have damaged portions of their optic nerve to re-train themselves to use the other photoreceptors that they were previously ignoring. This would indicate to me, that providing you worked at it, you could probably make up for whatever aliasing there were by simply re-training to use your improved retinal image.
Go Lakers!
People who are extremely nearsighted have a greatly increased risk for torn retinas. Corrective lenses tend to make the nearsighted more nearsighted, because the eye adapts. So how would this effect the risk of torn retinas?
...so it looks like I won't be needing this for a while.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Assume eceryone gets these, using the "enhanced contrast for everyone". (obviously not: many will be afraid, poor - especially in other countries, or the surgery mistakes, etc.) But if it did happen, would we still define 20/20 as we know it? 20/20 is "normal", so would 20/2.5 become the "new 20/20?
Actually, if everyone had perfect vision, we probably wouldn't need to gauge eyesight...
If everyone is getting super eyes that can see through your walls, the solution seems obvious. Get better walls! Use some kind of material that shows a uniform, even heat distribution. Add some kind of shielding to block all other forms of electromagnetic radiation.
This would be great for that linux ppc guy that got in the car accident!
--this mesage will self distruct in five seconds--
"If I removed everything here that I thought was pointless, there would be like two messages here."
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
The best thing about this story is that the submitter picked the rarely-used "Upgrades" category for it.
The worst thing is, he accepted it as an upgrades category
...that service packs for the firmware will be affectionately called 'eye patches'?
+1 to the submitter for his choice of category. Made me laugh first thing in the morning.
20/2.5 though, that means being able to read over the shoulder of someone on the other side of the room. Oh and monitor and TV technology is going to have to get MUCH better.
On the plus side, books could be something like 1/3 or 1/4th the size they are now. Imagine, no more lugging around giant O'Reilly tomes, now you can have the complete set of Perl books condensed to the size of a cheap paperback!
Is there a maximum (20/0)?
My understanding is like Brento's -- the numbers X/Y mean you can see at X feet as someone with "normal" vision can see at Y feet. So, of course, 20/0 would mean you can see something at 20 feet away with the same accuracy that someone with normal vision would if they stuck it to their eyeball.
-- dR.fuZZo
Luckily for me, I guess, my problem is not with missing rods/cones, but with cones that don't work properly. My particular problem is being researched at Wilmer (Eye Center at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore). I wouldn't anticipate surgery like what's mentioned in the article would do you, or me, any good, but I would think that if anyplace is researching your problem, Wilmer is. Just a thought...
I'd swap my eyes out once the replacement offers better resolution, the ability to zoom, IR wavelengths and a wireless computer interface. They'd also have to be secure, though. Wouldn't want some skript kiddie hacking my eyes while I'm driving.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The makers of these bionic eyes will, in order to subsidize the cost, probably implement GPS tracking devices in these bionic eyes so they can offer exclusive advertising rights on your retina according to your location. This would be bad for driving.
This is not an upgrade at all. Well not for me at least. My vision is already far better than 20/20. I can read the bottom line of any eye chart from twice as far away as your are supposed to be. With either eye closed. However my left eye is a little stronger. I can imagine a world where me and my offspring are the only ones with "real" eyes and everyone else has bionic eyes. That would be freaky.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I was pleased that the paper addressed the issue of neuronal density, and that even if the optics were perfect, the receptors aren't up to the task.
Really, this is the way it evolved: each part's complexity and accuracy is limited by the others. We wouldn't evolve the optics of eagles unless we also had the neural capability to do something with it.
It doesan't stop at the rods and cones though. The ganglion cells behind them agregate localized cells for transmission to the LGN and then the visual cortex. These too would have to be completely rewired, not to mention the rewiring of the visual cortex, for the increased clarity to do much good at all. The plasticity of the visual track just isn't high enough in adults.
This sort of surgery would have to be done while the brain is still forming its visual pathways, pretty much from 0-8 months. Then, even if we didn't have a higher fovial neural count (and who knows, we might get a higher count if the optic acuity is there early enough), the visual pathways from the retina on back would form based on the higher acuity, helping us make better use of the enhancement, especially, as the paper mentioned, in the area of feature detection, because the bipolar ganglion cells would likely link to smaller clusters of rods and cones, taking advantage of the greater clarity.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
Perfect, now the DMCA can be leverged right at the
source of when we see copyrighted materials!!!
SWEET!!
No more watching that most unAmerican of material, the unCopyrighted material
:)
:-)
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
I'm a bit concerned with the idea of everyone having thermal vision. Talk about a huge invasion of privacy. I'm an apartment dweller and would not like for other tenants snooping on me simply by looking through the wall.
That's no big deal... just turn the A/C down to 50 when having sex!
"And like that
It could have been a depth perception issue.
Humans determine visual distance using a several factors.
When both eyes are working our eyes form two vertices of a triangle. The third vertex is whatever we are looking at. We "know" the distance between our eyes and the angles of the eye vertices. This is enough information to determine the distance of the object vertex from our eyes. This works fairly well at close range, but you need both eyes.
We also "know" how big most things in our environment are and can make distance estimates based on perceptual deviations from these sizes.
Thirdly our eyes focus on whatever we are looking at. We can feel how much our eyes need to strain to put an object into focus and derive distance information from that.
You were using one eye so the first, and most reliable method, was unavailable to you. Distance perception via size is not too good because objects come in different sizes and guessing distance based on size is a rather high level process.
Since you can't focus well with your bad eye the third option doesn't work very well either. Thus when you tore of your eye patch you suddenly made your depth perception much more accurate, and since your perception of velocity, in terms of distance from you, is based on depth perception, you could suddenly tell at what rate the car in front of you was accellerating.
The last time I dropped acid I noticed the pixels of my eyes. Everything looked like a computer monitor, was pretty cool. :)
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Now, what if there were a switch to change to a computer? Just flip a switch and have a truly tiny laptop!
With all the talk of increased resolution, what would also be sueful, and far less difficult from a visual pathways standpoint, would be building eyes that could respond to different frequency ranges, or be able to increase contrast and control brightness better than our existing eyes. Look at sunspots one secong, then step into a pitch black room and play hunter with your cat in the dark.
Imagine, just for a second, what life would be like if we didn't have to have streetlights, reading lights, big, bright monitors, or even daylight most of the time. You could hike through the woods at night without even noticing a difference, and driving through fog would be no difficulty for your infrared eyes.
All without having to deal with the problems posed by increased resolution in the visual pathway.
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
I am definitely not beta-testing. What if there is a GPF?
Jaeger
www.JohnQHacker.com
GodHatesCalvinists.com
Can anyone say "Cyberpunk"?
I don't know about you, but growing up waaay back in the 20th century, this kind of stuff was just science fiction. The most advanced promise I saw for vision was on the old TV show "That's Incredible", in which they showed how they could make a blind person "see" brail by stimulating the brain directly. It's not a long just to go from that to, say, miniature video cameras to give full video to the blind.
But this isn't restoring sight, it's enhansing it! I've worn glasses most of my life, and the idea of being able to see 20/10 or better is awesome! I just hope it comes in the next ten years...
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
So, while it's not the typical lot of a sysadmin or programmer, it is possible :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm just wondering, all the problems with this technology aside(e.g. size of equipment), what about the discomfort to the subject? In fact, other questions present themselves:
What are the numbers for resultant eye-infection?
What, if any, supplemental medication has to be prescribed - such as eye drops etc...?
What's the effect of the Lasik surgical manoeuvre on eyesight when Williams' apparatus isn't present?
I mean, 20/10, or maybe even 20/2.5, maybe great, but drop your glasses and if your left with 2/300 - well that would stop me getting the op...
Unless they paid me
8)
Concrete analysis...
While I haven't had LASIK, and I'm just a lowly member of the glasses/contacts-wearing population, I'm truly bothered by the advertising seen in most big cities regarding LASIK surgery. The ads seem typically only to consist of an attractive woman and an appealing price (usually around $1000) -- the exact same marketing that glasses/contact shops have used for years. The difference is, bad glasses or contacts are, except in rare, rare instances reversible, whereas LASIK is not. If LASIK goes wrong, you're stuck with it for life. It's not something where you just want to pop in over the weekend. IMHO, the risk is so great that the procedure should not be done at this time for purely cosmetic reasons.
A common issue with LASIK, and possibly the bionic eyes mentioned in the above article, seems to be the definition of 20/20. What most people don't know is that one's vision can be poor, even when tests show that it's 20/20. For most people with astigmatism, simply correcting vision to 20/20 will still yield a blurry, poorly defined image for that person -- astigmatism correction needs to be put into place as well. Someone can get LASIK, test out at 20/20, and have double-vision and lens flares. The fact that a bionic eye can simply enhance vision to 20/2.5 isn't impressive unless the image is a comfortable one -- sharp, clearly defined, one that doesn't cause headaches.
While perfect bionic vision may be available in the future, right now, there's no replacement for those OEM eyes. Be careful with them, and caveat emptor...
Eschatfische.
This month's Popular Science has a couple of pages about it, pretty immoble right now, it requires a pool table's worth of optics and equipment.
Justin Ingersoll
Deja vu
---------------
Vpered na Mars!
Although "20/10" vision signifies something like "You see at 20 feet what most people see at 10 feet," it means that primarily in the sense of resolution/detail/acuity, not in the sense of magnification. In other words, you could read a sign (or whatever) 2x as far away -- but that's because the letters are not blurring together as much, not because it appears twice as large on your retinas.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
This was great (other than what they call "glare" at night)... a problem of blurring that only shows up in high contrast conditions.
4 years later, my vision is probably about 20/50 (last measured 20/35) in both eyes... it has slowly drifted. But vision is still vastly better than before, and still correctable to 20/12 (or equiv in the nearsighted eye... let's see... 3.3/2).
Also, let me point out a few things:
If yours doesn't, go somewhere else!
The only good weather is bad weather.
Anyway, I ended up having to wear an eye patch over my good eye for quite some time, in order to force my bad eye (through glasses) to work at all. My opthamologist told me (well, my parents) that if I didn't wear the patch during this critical developmental period (to about 5 or 6 years old, IIRC), the neuronal system behind my bad eye would never develop properly, and I would in effect be uncorrectably blind in that eye for life: even if I got glasses and corrected the focus problems, I would never have grown the circuitry I needed to process that information. Ouch.
As it happens I have an appt at the eye doc on Monday, so we'll see just where I stand these days...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Related question: I know there are animals (notably bees) that can see in the ultraviolet -- and also some that can sense polarity, which I think is really cool too! -- but are there animals that have IR-capable vision? (I seem to recall snakes being able to sense IR, but I can't remember if it was via their eyes or some other organ.)
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Does anyone have any evidence that this is, in fact, the case?
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Whilst I am really interested in the potential of this technology, I think we might want to remember that we already know that:
1. Your eyeballs and lenses already adapt their shape in response to the visual information you're getting.
2. Some neuroscientists report that upto half the brain is involved with visual processing. In other words, we don't SEE, we CALCULATE. Permanently changing things like contrast might be a bad idea.
3. We don't just have foveal vision, we have peripheral vision too, which to me is more important (why see one thing when you can see thousands?) Laser surgery doesn't tend to improve peripheral vision as much.
4. Whatever's preventing you from having good eyesight is unlikely to be changed with surgery. Hence many people's eyesight starts getting worse again after surgery.
So surgery, being fairly permanent, seems quite drastic to me. I'm looking forward to those multi-function (infrared/microscope/telescope/X-ray!) glasses!
Fishdude - I can't send email, so hope you see this. It's easy to get glasses where one lens is pretty close to neutral and the other is much stronger. It's not quite the same effect as contact lenses, and you end up wearing these things on your face (:-), but it's non-invasive and miminal trouble, and much easier to put on and off than contact lenses. You're also a likely good candidate for laser surgery on the bad eye, since you've got one good eye you don't need to worry about if the surgery isn't successful, but glasses are easier and will do most of the job.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...seems like there's a piracy joke in here somewhere...
Speaking personally, I want this. I've been considering LASIK anyway, and I'll probably wait to see if this actually becomes available.
The bad side: I don't want my boss to have 20/2.5 vision, which would give him the ability to stand well out in the hall, glance into my office, and clearly read whatever I happen to be posting to Slashdot at that moment.
Diabetic retinopathy is easily preventable in all diabetics. Information can be found at the Life Extension Foundation site, the LEF forum site, and on the Medline database:
http://lef.org
http://forum.lef.org
http://medportal.com